Summary documentation of our outreach project can be downloaded here.

We are really lucky to live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the American Museum of Science and Energy.  It’s a great museum that has all sorts of science exhibits that encourage hands-on exploration. We’ve all loved going to the museum over the years, and we thought it would be a cool thing to provide some lunar exploration activities for the museum visitors.  The museum staff was really helpful in getting us set up and publicizing our project.  We got to talk to the visitors about the MoonBots Challenge, and let them do some experiments.  It was a lot of fun showing people some of the things we learned about the moon and getting kids excited about doing science.

Crater Formation

We set up some pans filled with a layer each of sand, flour and cocoa powder.  The visitors dropped different sized and shaped rocks into the pans and then measure the size of the “crater” that resulted.  This gave them an idea of how the craters on the moon’s surface were formed. You can download the details of the crater formation activity here.

Make Your Own Astrolabe

We had a station set up where the visitors could make an astrolabe.  We showed them how to use their astrolabe to make observations in the night sky. We also showed them how to use their astrolabe (and a little trigonometry) to measure the height of really tall things (without having to climb up with a tape measure). The visitors took their astrolabes home with them. You can download the astrolabe construction and use instructions here.

A Rocket on a String

Our third station let visitors experiment with Newton’s Third Law, which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In our case, the action was the air coming out of the balloon.  The reaction (which is the exciting part) is that the balloon sails off along the string. Physics is phun!  (Spelling is optional...) You can download the description of the rocket experiment here.

We also provided the visitors with a handout that contains a word search, a crossword puzzle, a maze, and a coloring page. If you want to try your hand at the word search and crossword, you can download them here.

One of the most exciting developments for us is that the museum has asked if we would be interested in providing them with an ongoing set of activities and experiments that we will write up. The museum will post them on their website.  This will make it easy for teachers and individuals who are looking for experiments to do with kids. And the experiments will be kid tested (and mother approved). We’re looking forward to having a long term relationship with the museum.

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