Science FUNdamentals Activities
Acids and Bases
Explore the acid-base indicator properties of a mysterious purple liquid: cabbage juice. Write secret messages, use the cabbage juice to test for carbon dioxide from your favourite carbonated beverage, test if you can make acid rain, and dissolve an eggshell with vinegar.
Air Pressure
Use air pressure to suck an egg into a jar. Use Bernoulli's principle to levitate and control ping pong balls. Test your aerodynamic knowledge by building balloon propelled rockets!
Bacteria vs. Viruses and Antibiotic Resistance
Teach your class about antibiotic resistance and the difference between bacteria and viruses. This demo teaches students the importance of hand washing and provides a fun experiment involving 'glowing germ powder'. Not all bugs need drugs!
Biosphere Cycles
Play an organism in an ecosystem and make a food web connecting all the organisms in your classroom. Witness the effects of extinctions on your ecosystem web. Next, play a carbon atom and track your movement through the carbon cycle. If space is available, play a game to simulate the dynamic relationships between the environment and population sizes.
Brain Builders
Roleplay as a neuron and experience how your brain communicates with your body. Experiment with different connections between neurons and discover how you can build a stronger brain.
Buoyancy and Surface Tension
How can an egg float in some water but not other water? What makes diet coke float but not regular coke? What makes root beer floats go foamy? Try some activities to explore these questions. Test your understanding of buoyancy by competing to build a tinfoil boat that supports the greatest load. Finally, the importance of surface tension will be demonstrated in a fizzy eruption!
Crime Scene Investigation
Someone stole my skittles! Role-play the suspects, collect evidence using chromatography, handwriting analysis and fingerprinting techniques, and then evaluate your evidence to reach a verdict!
Digestion and Respiration - COMING SOON
Test the importance of saliva first hand! See the coagulation of protein in stomach acid, and check out a model of just how long your intestines are. Make a model of how your lungs work and test how exercise affects respiratory rates.
Hearing and Sounds
This demo has four activities that explore the concepts of how our ears hear and distinguish various noises. Teach your class how sound waves, resonance, hearing recognition, and ear damage occur.
Light
Teach your class about the EMR spectrum and the different wavelengths of light. Demonstrate that different wavelengths produce different colours by burning different compounds over a candle!
Making Paper
Where does paper come from? How much do we use? Examine a huge slice of a tree trunk, and calculate just how much paper we use. What problems must be overcome to make paper? See for yourself how paper can be recycled by making yourself recycled paper from classroom scraps.
Mystery Powders
Help Science FUNdamentals identify their chemicals! Each student identifies one of seven unknown white powders using a series of chemical and physical tests. Use a dichotomous key to interpret your results and learn some surprising things about everyday kitchen chemicals in food! You can even polymerize your own jelly blobs out of orange juice and liquid antacid.
Psychology
How can you see movement where there is none? How can different people see the same images differently? How can context affect how you see things? How much of the world are we actually missing? How can we think we've seen things we haven't? These questions are explored with optical illusions and simple experiments on your own perception. You can even trick your brain into thinking you have switched hands with someone!
Rocks and Minerals - COMING SOON
Explore our collection of twenty-eight different rocks and minerals, include some very magnetic magnetite, oil sand, fossils and floating rocks! Try using a dichotomous key to identify these samples, test the samples against Moh's hardness scale, track the progress of a rock through the rock cycle, and guess which minerals you use everyday.
Strawberry DNA
Explore the genetic basis of your traits, and learn how genetics may be responsible for why you hate broccoli! Extract DNA from a strawberry and see this amazing molecule for yourself.
Van de Graaf
Explore electrical attractions and repulsions using a real Van de Graaf generator, then have a look inside the generator to see how it works! Harness the forces of electricity and magnetism to make a homopolar motor and make water spin.
