TechIntersect

My daughter Emily and I welcomed the summer season together last Saturday. She asked me what kids usually do to celebrate the first day of summer but looked downtrodden when I told her they usually go swimming because she is currently fighting an ear infection and can’t swim right now.

I promised her that we would do something special to celebrate in another way. I have been wanting to make some science videos with her this summer, so we took the advantage of the summer solstice to do just that. Starting at 11:00 am on June 21st, we marked with sidewalk chalk where the shadow cast from our basketball goal onto the driveway every ten minutes for over three hours.

I helped her measure the distance between the pole and the chalk mark with a tape measure. I had her write down the numbers she read from the tape measure in a little notebook. She was surprised to see how much the shadow moved in ten minutes.

I recorded all of this with the camcorder, and I plan to edit it into a short video about doing science with little kids. For a six year old, she actually did a very nice job of collecting data. We only missed one measurement in a three hour experiment.

Even I learned something in the project. For some reason, probably from old westerns, I thought the sun would be directly overhead at noon. With the data we gathered, we learned that the sun was overhead not at noon, but sometime around 1:30 on the 21st. I didn’t try to explain the next part to Emily, but I also figured that the sun was at a very high 73.25 degree angle on the first day of summer using our data using ATAN(113/34). (The pole is 113″ and the shadow was 34″)

Math has never been one of my strengths, but I don’t want my little girl to be afraid of numbers. After working on this project, I can see that she thinks this kind of stuff is fun. The next day, she asked me what we could do with all of the numbers we wrote down. So I had her read the numbers to me while I typed them into an Excel spreadsheet. Then we made the following graph that shows how the shadows got shorter and shorter until they finally started growing longer again.

Solstice Data: Shadows cast from a 113″ pole.

For a little girl, I think she did a great job! All of the marks and measurements were hers, I just coached her. This experiment in data collection that Emily did is very similar to the very first science experiment I did in college taking measurements of objects in the Physical Science classroom. A 6 year old doing college level work! I just hope she will continue to be curious and wonder how things work. I’ll be glad when she’s feeling better and can go swimming, but I’m glad we spent the first day of summer doing something together that was fun and educational.

Well, I guess I had better get busy and finish editing her video now. I’ll let you know when it is finished and available.

***Edit*** The Summer Science video is now uploaded and available for viewing!

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