As we grow up, what we like changes. So I have a few favourites. When I was just starting as a young scientist, I was doing some maths to analyse the results from my computer simulations. My professor said I got the maths wrong. We were both right and both wrong. My idea was right but I did get the maths wrong. It took a couple of maths to get the equations right — no one had it before, so we could look up the answer. Now lots of others use those equations to analyse THEIR computer simulations. So that is a favourite.
There have been other favourites, but a recent one is that my son — then in year 6 — and I built a working model to explain chromatography. What is chromatography? You might have put ink on a piece of paper and dipped the end in water, and as the water moves through the paper, the different colours separate. The science is well understood by scientists, but a working model would help students understand it better. If you are in Victoria, you might ask your teacher to have a look at LabTalk, the Journal of the Science Teachers’ Association of Victoria, volume 53, issue 3, pages 30-35, in 2009. That is a favourite because I did it with my son and it was just fun science.
Working on a zombie film set as a photographer. That was an enormous amount of fun. Fake blood everywhere and green zombies as far as the eye could see.
Though, for a favourite science related project, it would have to be when I was using the most powerful Scanning Electron Microscope in Western Australia as part of my work as a scientist. It is different to a microscope you might have at school where you place it on the lab bench with a light to see something magnified.
This microscope uses electrons instead of a light source to build a picture and sends it to a computer. It can allow scientists to view things that are only nanometres in size which are really really small. Look at a ruler with millimetres marked out. 1 millimetre is made up of 1 million nanometers. I was looking for something that was somewhere between 15-20 nanometres in size.
As we grow up, what we like changes. So I have a few favourites. When I was just starting as a young scientist, I was doing some maths to analyse the results from my computer simulations. My professor said I got the maths wrong. We were both right and both wrong. My idea was right but I did get the maths wrong. It took a couple of maths to get the equations right — no one had it before, so we could look up the answer. Now lots of others use those equations to analyse THEIR computer simulations. So that is a favourite.
There have been other favourites, but a recent one is that my son — then in year 6 — and I built a working model to explain chromatography. What is chromatography? You might have put ink on a piece of paper and dipped the end in water, and as the water moves through the paper, the different colours separate. The science is well understood by scientists, but a working model would help students understand it better. If you are in Victoria, you might ask your teacher to have a look at LabTalk, the Journal of the Science Teachers’ Association of Victoria, volume 53, issue 3, pages 30-35, in 2009. That is a favourite because I did it with my son and it was just fun science.
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Working on a zombie film set as a photographer. That was an enormous amount of fun. Fake blood everywhere and green zombies as far as the eye could see.
Though, for a favourite science related project, it would have to be when I was using the most powerful Scanning Electron Microscope in Western Australia as part of my work as a scientist. It is different to a microscope you might have at school where you place it on the lab bench with a light to see something magnified.
This microscope uses electrons instead of a light source to build a picture and sends it to a computer. It can allow scientists to view things that are only nanometres in size which are really really small. Look at a ruler with millimetres marked out. 1 millimetre is made up of 1 million nanometers. I was looking for something that was somewhere between 15-20 nanometres in size.
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