Help me give my students a vacuum pump to remove all the air from a bell jar so they can witness first-hand how sound will not travel in the vacuum of space.
Middle school students are the BEST because they have so many questions, especially when it comes to space. My 8th grade students come from diverse backgrounds. In our classes, we have mainstream students working alongside English learners, special needs students, GATE students, Honors students, and even students who visit us for science from their moderate-severe special day class. From time-to-time, we even bring in elementary students for our 8th grade students to teach!
Through hands-on experiences, I strive to engage them to continue to wonder about the world around them, to the stars and beyond.
We introduce every unit with a phenomenon that gets them hooked and eager to learn the science behind it. Students take on the roles of engineers who identify problems, plan ways to solve those problems, test them out, and evaluate their results to make improvements.
My Project
Eighth graders learn about how soundwaves travel, and how they require a medium through which to travel. They conduct many investigations along the way, from making music by blowing on bottles filled with varying amounts of water to using tuning forks to move nearby objects. This unit culminates with students developing an earthquake rescue plan where they are told that a devastating earthquake has just struck and they are stuck inside my classroom. Time is limited and they must get a message out to rescuers. By using their knowledge of how sound travels differently through gases, liquids, and solids, they develop their rescue plan by examining the objects in my classroom and how they would utilize them.
As they learn about how soundwaves travel at different speeds through different mediums, they learn that soundwaves cannot travel in a vacuum such as outer space.
This is a difficult concept for them to understand. In prior years, I have just shown them a video of a bell jar where the air is removed and the sound coming from an object inside slowly quiets down. If we were to have our own vacuum pump, I could demonstrate this concept to them first-hand, thus making it even more meaningful than simply watching a video.
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