Today I went to the Technorama (sciency hands-on center place idk) after school with some other people from different math classes... I thought it was pretty boring. Which is really sad because I was really really looking forward to going!
The part that was kind of interesting was the workshop that we did as a class, where we worked with liquid nitrogen and frozen CO2 (dry ice!) and fire and lots of snazzy stuff. But I picked a bad partner who had no sense of wonder apparently. She would perform the experiment, go "neat." And move on. Hello? You just did this sequence of events that led to this thing suddenly erupting into flames??? Does that not make you want to stop and think for two seconds why? It's not like they were tricky experiments. Whoah, look, a glowing piece of steel wool burns like crazy when you put it into a flask with a bunch of oxygen. I wonder why. Duh. So that was a mistake. Oh well. Lab coats and goggles are always fun, I guess.
And I feel like the actual permanent displays were not that interesting. I was impressed at how much stuff there was to look at and fiddle with, but it was also still quite simple. It would definitely help someone trying to learn or understand basic math or science. Multiple visual representations of Pythagoras's Theorem that you can twist and take apart etc etc are definitely useful. Oh well! I went and spent an afternoon somewhat stimulating my brain. Example: what kind of mathematical formulas do they program this magnet-controlled ball with so that it creates beautiful, perfect patterns in the sand and how does that translate to the machine actually moving the magnet around? Sadly this was not explained on the plaque.
That turned into a rant pretty quickly. Oops. I guess I'm just sick of stupid people.
Tomorrow I'm going to a friend's house for a sleepover because we don't have school Friday or Monday because of Easter! Yippee! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment