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It takes a lot of talent, determination, conditioning, training, and dedication to make it to the Olympics. But every sport also involves points at which angles, trajectories, momentum, and laws of physics intersect with raw talent and the thrill of performance. Learn more about what goes into Olympic-caliber success by investigating the sports science involved in your favorite Olympic events.

Excitement around the world is building as the Olympic torch is carried on the final legs of its journey. The 2012 Olympic Games begin this weekend, and millions will be watching the opening ceremonies as the Games kick off with a tribute to all athletes and participating countries. This year's Games include thirty-six large categories of sporting competition, many of which contain a number of separate events. Summer Olympic sports range from gymnastics, cycling, swimming, and track and field to beach volleyball, archery, table tennis, and Judo.

While thousands of spectators will file in to watch events in London, many of us will watch from home, including many young athletes for whom the 30th anniversary games may inspire the spark of a dream.

Watching the Games

Those who qualify to compete at the Olympics have amazing ability in their sport. In coming weeks, fans will hear and read many stories about these athletes, stories of their dedication, their rigorous training and demanding schedules, and, often, of their perseverance. These athletes are among the best, the fastest, the most flexible, and the strongest, in the world.

As you watch the games—and observe the differences in times, routines, and results—you might wonder what factors make a difference in performance. While there is no discounting talent, the more an athlete knows about the science of her sport, the more chance she has of standing on the podium and receiving a medal. From your spectator spot at home, you and your family can talk about some of the elements of sports science that relate to the sporting events you will be watching on television during this year's Olympics Games or to other favorite sports and athletic activities.

Winning Gold

The Olympics offer an exciting opportunity to think about what makes a difference between those who medal and those who don't. There may be exceptions. There may be displays of record-breaking talent in unexpected places, but there is plenty of science that underlies each sport. You and your family might have fun, in between favorite events, exploring some of these sports science questions and even putting some of them to the test at home.

Here are a few Science Buddies Project Ideas that can help you uncover kid-friendly science to talk about during the games or at dinner. While each of these projects can be conducted as a science fair entry, using the background information and general steps of the Experimental Procedure, you can turn these into family science explorations. If a casual family science experiment is the goal, you may find testing these concepts a lot of fun, and there's no need for multiple trials. Leave the multiple heats for the track and field participants!

• "Balancing Act: Finding Your Center of Gravity": Exceptional balance on the beam is important for gymnasts during their routines, but many sports require good balance. Walk through the steps of this project to learn more about your own center of gravity.
• "Drag Racing in the Water": Speed in a swimming race has a lot to do with how smoothly a swimmer's body passes through the water. This project helps you understand the importance of reducing drag in the water. You won't see swimmers wearing street clothes in the pool, but you might look at swimmer's gear with fresh understanding after experimenting at your local pool!
• "Speed Quest": Many Olympic sports are feats of speed. The fastest runners, swimmers, and cyclists will take home medals in the next two weeks, and you will see and hear plenty of speed measurements—world records, speeds for certain races, and speeds needed to qualify for final heats. Learn more about how to calculate and understand speed, and then put your own speed to the test! You'll also learn to compare speeds in races of different distances.
• "Jumping Distance": Do events that take place in the center arena of track and field keep you on the edge of your seat? If you have tried standing and running long jumps before, you know how amazing the distances Olympic track and field athletes jump can be. This project helps you investigate the importance of the "running" start in the running long jump and will give you a better understanding of the relationship between the starting distance, the speed, momentum, and the ultimate jump.
• "Jack and Jill Went Up a Hill and Came Biking Down After": Choosing the Best Gear Ratio for Speed": Learn more about how bicycle gears work, and what range of gears generate the most speed as a cyclist comes around a curve and into a straightaway.
• "Nothing But Net: The Science of Shooting Hoops": Grab a ball and experiment with your basketball shooting technique. If you are watching the Olympic Games, see if you can tell how the most successful players get off their shots!

The Olympic Spirit

Have fun watching the Games and making your own real-world connections at home as you uncover some of the science at work beneath the medal-winning performances. You might even find that the seed of a science project for the coming school year gets planted by your family exploration!

Get the kids together, build a simple vision protractor, and play a fun game of "now you see it, now you don't" while exploring the world of peripheral vision.

By Kim Mullin

It's a Side Issue

You are reading an exciting mystery in your favorite chair and suddenly spy one of your kids sneaking into the room to scare you. You and your kids are throwing baseball in the backyard, and as you catch the ball, you notice a friend waving at you over the fence. What do these two activities have in common? Peripheral vision!

One Set of Eyes, Two Kinds of Vision

We are almost always using both central vision and peripheral vision. Central vision is what we use to focus our eyes on one particular thing, such as a few words in a sentence or a particular tree in the yard. At the same time, our peripheral vision fills in the surrounding information. For example, if you focus your eyes on a tree in the yard, your peripheral vision fills in the grass, fence, bushes, and sky that are around the tree. What you see with peripheral vision is less sharply focused.

Our peripheral vision is controlled by the rods and cones in our retinas. Cones are sensitive to color, whereas rods are sensitive to motion. Rod cells are also better at sensing objects in dim light than cone cells are and are responsible for detecting things moving toward you before you can focus on them. The placement of the rods and cones on our retinas controls our peripheral vision.

Test Your Peripheral Vision

Just as people have different running abilities, people also have differing peripheral vision abilities. Using foam board, string, and a few other simple materials, you and your kids can build a vision protractor to compare each other's peripheral vision. The "Now You See It, Now You Don't" project guides you through the process. Once complete, the vision protractor is a fun tool for exploring what we really can and can't see. Test each other by moving small objects in and out of your range of vision. But don't cheat! Always keep your eyes focused on a fixed object directly in front of you.

Other questions you might explore using the vision protractor include: Is it easier to see some colors than others? Are larger objects easier to see than smaller ones? What role does ambient lighting play in peripheral vision? What if the objects are moving? What if you didn't have peripheral vision? How would your life be different?

Build the protractor, test your vision, and see how fun family summer science can be!

Rising sixth-grade student weighs in on the first week of Gamestar Mechanic's summer video game design camp. The first week was all about platformers. Do you know what it takes to make a top-notch platformer like Super Mario or Donkey Kong?

Gamestar Mechanic's online summer video game design program is underway! Geared specifically for students ages 10-14, the virtual summer "camp" gives students who love video games, or who have already begun exploring video game design, a chance to level up their knowledge of video game history, major game styles, and core design elements. As they work through four weekly units and tackle various activities, assignments, and challenges, participants will get plenty of fun and focused hands-on game design practice. Budding game designers will also benefit from feedback from other student designers, their instructor, and, in the end, an industry pro.

On paper, a camp that involves four weeks of making and playingvideo games sounds like a great opportunity for the student video game enthusiast. Not only does the student get to spend a month playing games and tackling video game design challenges, but the course is flexible in timing and can be worked in and around other summer activities and programs. What's it like from the student perspective?

One Designer's Experience

Science Buddies is taking a hands-on, behind-the-scenes look at the Gamestar Mechanic Summer Program by peeking over the shoulder of Matthew, a student designer taking the course. Soon to be a middle school student, Matthew particularly enjoys math and science, reads manga, plays soccer, is a visual artist, and has a deep affinity for video games, especially one for iOS, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Facebook. Before he could read, he was telling people he wanted to be a video game designer.

In past summer experiences, Matthew has used Stagecast Creator and Multimedia Fusion. After learning about Gamestar Mechanic from Science Buddies, he worked through the quests there. He also recently explored Yoyo's GameMaker. This summer's Gamestar Mechanic program is a next step in the exploration of video game design for Matthew. He's already a fan of the Gamestar Mechanic platform, so at the outset of Week 1, he was excited about the course and hoping to both learn more, encounter some new challenges. In short, he's looking at this summer camp experience as a way to level up!

Unit 1: The Platformer

The first week of the course focuses on platformer games. Whether they know the terminology or not, most gamers are probably familiar with games in this genre. Classic games like Donkey Kong, Mario, and even early Sonic all exemplify the platformer format.

The first week's course materials kick off with an excellent and engaging video in which a headset-wearing guide walks users through the key elements of a platformer game. From perspective to gravity, students get a video-based crash course in what really "matters" in this genre—and a look at plenty of examples of games that demonstrate these key elements. Did you know that being able to "jump" is particularly important in a platformer? Couple that fact with the importance of perspective, and you've got the foundation for a game. "Jumping is what makes a platformer a platformer," says Matthew. "If your character can't jump, you'd have a top-down," he explains.

Being a veteran at Gamestar Mechanic, Matthew was familiar with much of the material for week one, but the videos, game samples, and challenges helped review and reinforce key concepts. Differentiating between the platformer and another core style, he continues, "In a top-down game, bird's-eye view, you can't jump, and you don't change gravity. But in a platformer, you can control gravity." Gravity makes a huge difference in game play, says Matthew. "Set it to six, and you feel like you have a 1,000 pound boulder on your back."

In addition to perspective and gravity, students learned about various jumps that can be used to navigate the spatial elements of a platformer. "I learned what all the jumps are called—hook, horizontal, and vertical—and how to use them to their highest potential inside of my games." He says that the examples helped him think about the importance of using the various jumps effectively.

After completing his first game assignment, a platformer, he moved on to one of the extra-credit challenges for the first week—design a re-make of a retro classic platformer. "That was really cool," says Matthew, who admits to searching for his old copy of Super Mario for the Gameboy to relive the fun after watching the Super Mario video in the course. "That assignment was cool because you were able to see you can make games like Sonic using Gamestar Mechanic," he says. "Sometimes, you can even make them better!"

When asked about the importance of a young designer going back and looking at a timeline of video games, Matthew notes that he hadn't heard of all the games he learned about in the first week of camp. Games that are familiar and nostalgic for older gamers are sometimes games younger games don't know at all. The course's careful attention to the history of design and gaming upon which tomorrow's games will build is a cool stepping stone for the participants and helps connect what they are learning to the video gaming industry at large.

Moving Ahead

Matthew is now working on Unit 2—the Action Game. Stay tuned as we check in with him next week to see how it's going.

Sign-ups are now open for the next sessions of the Gamestar Mechanic Online Learning Program, with six-week sessions beginning September 10, 2012.

Families and young engineers can get hands on exploring the ins and outs of tower building using LEGO®, spaghetti, or even newspaper. Have fun seeing who can build the tallest tower, but be prepared for some structural collapses along the way as they explore what works—and what doesn't.

When you think of a city's skyline, or of notable landmarks in an area, you probably immediately think of structures that stand out either because of their architectural design, like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or because of their height. A building that rises above everything around it is certain to attract attention, and vertical living and working solutions offer a different approach for civil engineers tackling questions related to limited space and growing population. Reflecting the quest to build higher, listings of tallest structures and towers often seem like something from a global engineering competition, with new buildings reaching up to adopt the title of "tallest" only to, later, be replaced by something even taller.

The Tallest of Tall

A timeline of tallest towers, buildings, and structures chronicles a history of taller and taller structures as engineers conquer structural challenges and develop new ways to make materials like steel and concrete reach even higher. Today, the Tokyo Skytree, standing 2,080 feet tall, is listed as the tallest non-habitable tower in the world. The Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai, holds the title of tallest man-made structure (of any kind) and rises more than 2,700 feet. Just last week, The Shard, a 95-story building in London, was named the tallest structure in Western Europe at 1,016 feet, but its regional claim to fame may be short lived. Already another tower is underway that is projected to out-climb it by year's end. That the Washington Monument stands just a bit more than 555 feet puts the sheer climb of these record-holding structures in vertical perspective. By comparison, Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) in Chicago is the tallest building in the United States. Willis Tower stands 1,451 feet and held the "tallest in the world" title in 1973 and for almost a quarter century after. It lost the title to the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Putting civil engineering to the side, another tower completed this year in South Korea also set a record—the record for the tallest tower built from LEGO blocks. Rising skyward 105 feet, and built by 4,000 children using more than 500,000 bricks, the celebratory tower topped the previous record-holding LEGO tower by inches.

Scaled to Size

Whether real-world towers or LEGO creations, looking at the history of tall structures and at current towers offers important clues about fundamental engineering and materials sciences concepts that go into tower construction. Even toddlers building towers with chunky plastic bricks run into predictable structural problems. Stack too many Duplo® blocks one on top of another, and the tower, ultimately, will begin to lean and fall. Similar issues arise with smaller LEGO bricks, but the greater variety of brick sizes lets kids experiment with more sophisticated structural design as they search for various ways to increase stability to support greater height. The "Building the Tallest Tower" project lets students explore tower construction and the relationship between height and stability—especially in the context of shaking.

Other questions your tower builders might ask and investigate with their tower creations include: Does a tower require a certain shape? Are certain shapes more stable at greater heights? What's the mathematical relationship between the size of the base and a stable height? How do you keep a tower from bending? Why might it bend and at what height? What forces, like wind, does a tower have to withstand?

Beyond Bricks

While brick-based building materials like LEGO offer widespread ground for exploration and innovation, young engineers can also pursue tower construction using other household or toy-based materials and supplies. Building a tower from newspaper, alone, poses a fun challenge in problem solving and creative thinking. Add a bit of tape or glue in the process, and see how much taller the structure can rise.

For something completely different, bring out the pasta and challenge your builders to see what kind of tower they can construct using uncooked spaghetti noodles and Emer's® glue. The "The Leaning Tower of Pasta" project can help you get started. While the project offers a procedure older students can use for a school assignment or science fair, parents can use the general information as a guideline for a fun family science activity. Bring out the glue and pasta! Make sure you have plenty of pasta on hand, and encourage an exploration of noodle length as part of the investigation. Other building materials you and your students might try include toothpicks, popsicle sticks, straws, or even sugar cubes.

How high can you go?

Creating a display of a science collection can be a wonderful exercise in observation and classification. Plus, your student will end up with a tactile visual reminder and keepsake.

Some students collect postage stamps, coins, or baseball cards. Some prefer to nurture, seek, and expand collections of natural specimens. Leaves, feathers, rocks, and bugs are all common childhood collections as students explore the world around them with an eye to the ground, to the nearest bushes, to the garden, to the beach, or to what might be crawling around beneath a large rock. Creating display board collections of leaves or insects is a common school assignment, but for some young scientists, the desire to quantify and catalog the natural world is a drive that extends beyond the classroom walls and may continue into adulthood.

These kinds of collections inspire an appreciation for just how many species, in any domain, there really are. That there are more than 70,000 known species of flowering plants is a simple reminder that the natural world is much bigger than what you see in your own backyard. Visual displays of groups of natural objects, or of items related to a scientific theme, help viewers understand the scope and potential of certain areas, but they also make for interesting viewing. Harold Feinstein's photo collections, like One Hundred Butterflies and One Hundred Seashells, showcase difference, beauty, and variation in nature. As Fred Gagnon writes in the forward to One Hundred Butterflies, "butterfly collections and books are just some of the ways to tell people, 'Look what is out there in the world we live in every day. There is so much more than butterflies... yet look how many butterflies there are!'"

For those who appreciate the aesthetics of a grid or love even the hint of tessellation, visual displays can be both informative and artistic. Pheromone: The Insect Artwork of Christopher Marley, for example, shows a fascination with the beauty and diversity of insects, but Marley's work is also mesmerizing in its arrangement.

Cultivating a Collection

Scouring the backyard, local parks, or nearby beaches for items that fit a collection is a great way to encourage observation and increased awareness of local habitats and biospheres. Especially if the collection centers upon something in which the student is interested, this can be an excellent activity for summer months. Frogs? Leaves? Beetles? Collections don't come in a one-subject-fits-all format, but the quest for building, identifying, and showcasing a collection lets a student delve into an area of interest, with tangible and lasting results. You might even find that a collection project helps shape and guide some unexpected summer excursions and may feed a growing passion in a particular area of science!

Getting Started

While a collection of findings from the backyard may not be as elaborate or as nuanced as a collection from a field scientist, this kind of student project can turn into an exciting quest and generate greater awareness of local biodiversity. The "Making Species Maps" and "Finding Phyla" projects offer guidance for getting a better sense of what species are in a specific area or local habitat. While these projects don't focus on a single species, they may help you and your students pinpoint a topic for a collection by first assessing what is around you. Similarly, the "Bug Vacuums: Sucking up Biodiversity" project can help you get started in thinking about how students can build and track an investigation of a nearby space, but you don't have to limit your students to bugs, insects, and worms!

Build a Photo Display

As part of an informal science collection process and project, creating a tangible display encourages students to work systematically on the project over a period of time. Some collections are added to over a period of weeks, months, or even years. Some collectors cultivate lifelong collections. With a visual display and catalog in mind as the "goal" of the collection, you will need to think through strategies for displaying the samples, but you (or your student) may or may not feel comfortable with a collection of once-live specimens. A workaround may be as close as your family camera. A photo-based documentation of findings and sightings can be a good entry point for a young enthusiast—and might eliminate concerns you have about 'pinning' samples. Plus, photographing a collection makes it easier to display a collection of larger or dimension objects, like rocks, shells, or sea glass. With photos, your students can work on cultivating a science collection that can scale with their age, interest, and the time spent scavenging.

Scavenging for All Ages

A photo-based collection lets even the youngest of students observe their surroundings and search for new samples to record. For older students, collecting photo samples can be a building-block opportunity for learning more about photography, but even without an understanding of focal point or aperture, passing out disposable cameras to your kids at the start of a nature walk can yield surprising results. Giving them the keys to independently document and record their findings may or may not generate high-quality photos, but you may find that they are more enthusiastic about the scavenger hunt with their own camera in hand.

Display the Findings

Once your students have amassed a number of photos, or finished their disposable cameras, print or develop the pictures. If you are working with digital photos, you might print the photos in varying sizes. You might also encourage students to crop or trim prints to best showcase the subject at hand. With a pile of printed photos, your students can mount them on foam board. Using reference books or field guides, encourage (or help) them to look up and identify samples captured in the photos and then label the photos on the board. (Tip: check out a few field guides from the library at the start of the project so they have a sense of what they may find, how specimens may differ, and how to make initial steps in identification or classification. They might also create a "most wanted" bucket list of samples they'd like to find.)

Start Small

Be realistic about what your student might manage to collect or locate. Your student might enjoy the challenge of trying to find a certain number of samples a week, a month, or over the total summer. But emphasize that a good collection grows over time. You don't have to have "every" sample in hand to start gluing things onto a display board. The board can be added to as the collection grows! Even a budding collection display can be pretty cool propped on a bookshelf or ledge, a visual reminder of a natural interest and of time spent exploring.

What will you find next for your display board collection? You might be surprised! Happy collecting!

Do you have a science collection? If you or your students have a science collection, we would love to see! Share photos (and your science collection stories) by emailing them to amy@sciencebuddies.org.

Multiplication tables? Fibonacci sequence? First 23 numbers of Pi? Algebra problems? Solid shapes? Bucky balls? Zany stories about rabbits that multiply exponentially? School may be out for the summer, but studies suggest that sending math skills on vacation might be a bad idea!

When it comes to math, the adage, "you snooze you lose" may ring alarmingly true. Studies show that math is the academic subject most at risk during the summer months, with students losing, on average, two months of grade-level knowledge.^* Reading is a great way to help keep brain cells fired up over the summer, and tackling high-interest summer science projects lets students exercise a range of skills and hands-on problem-solving strategies. But with the loss of math skills adding up to possible academic setback, boosting opportunities for summer math can be exponentially important for your students. While some parents may shy away from putting more math on the summer schedule, it can be easier than you think to infuse summer days with hands-on and real-world math. No abacus required!

Adding Up Opportunities for Math

So what can you do to get them talking about numbers, adding things up, keeping division skills oiled, and encouraging them to see the geometry that appears in the spaces and objects around them? The following list offers some suggestions to help you ease math into your days. Keep in mind that you may have the best success if you focus on fun math activities, and be sure to pick and choose approaches and titles that are appropriate for your student's age and comfort level with math.

Guided math explorations. Step-by-step hands-on math explorations can be fun as a family activity family—or good for older, independent student investigation. The following Science Buddies Project Ideas can be turned into engaging activities:

• "Juice Box Geometry": Not all juice boxes look the same, and they don't all hold the same amount! By exploring the dimensions of various rectangular juice boxes, students can see the relationship between volume, the dimensions of a three-dimensional box, and the packaging required to cover the surface area of the container. If your student is drinking something from a "box," grab a ruler, and see what you can learn from a few simple measurements. Does the formula-based calculation match up to the amount the package says the container holds? Do your students prefer ice cream to juice? You can adapt this math-based exploration to compare ice cream containers, too!
• "M&M Math": What's your favorite color of M&M? What are the odds that you'll pull that color from the bag when you reach in? This tasty activity introduces students to statistics and probability. (Another colored candy could be used instead of M&Ms. Or, if your student enjoys sorting the candies and tallying the totals of each color, encourage an informal comparison of two different kinds of candy. Do they have the same amounts of different colors? Do they seem to have similar amounts of each color? Is your chance of getting a red one the same for each candy?)
• "Dice Probabilities": Some games value certain numbers (or dice totals) more than others. What are the chances that you'll roll the number you need? Is it just luck? Or are there mathematical rules that come into play and help explain why you roll certain numbers? Put it to the test! This project compares combined values rolled using two different kinds of dice. Increase the odds for fun by having another friend or family member do the same test and compare the results!

Prime books. There are many engaging math-themed books available for students, especially for the elementary school crowd. Younger readers may enjoy titles like Sir Cumference: And the First Round Table, Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland, , all part of a series of medieval math adventures. Other innovative math-themed storybooks for the elementary school crowd include Multiplying Menace: The Revenge Of Rumpelstiltskin and Pythagoras and the Ratios: A Math Adventure. For books with less story and more puzzle, consider titles like Math-terpieces: The Art of Problem-Solving, The Grapes Of Math, and others by Gregory Tang. Similarly, The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat and Further Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat may captivate young math students.

Even younger readers may enjoy puzzling through fictitious problems that can be solved with math in titles like Spaghetti And Meatballs For All!, or learning about important mathematicians in titles like Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci. And for those with an eye to shape and form, The Greedy Triangle is an engaging introduction to geometry, and Can You Count to a Googol? helps kids understand the vastness of numbers. Then there is Math Curse (and the sequel, Science Verse), a clever romp through the math that appears in everyday situations. The tone is playful, and the visual treatment is engaging and fits the fast pace and high energy of the story. This duo makes a fun read-aloud pair for all ages and brings up everyday math and science in a playful way.

Titles factorial. For older elementary readers and math enthusiasts, titles like Math Trek and Math Trek 2: A Mathematical Space Odyssey encourage and continue math learning and problem solving at home. Math Trek 2 takes students on a fictitious space journey that begins with a launch pad countdown (using the Fibonacci series) before rocketing readers into a math-based journey that is both fun—and accessible. Activities are offered along the way for DIY exploration, but the story alone can be enjoyed as a family or for solo reading. Curious about the Golden Ratio or what a "golden rectangle" is and what that has to do with the spirals you see in nature? Math Trek 2 explains it all as part of the story. Another summer reading title that is more story and less workbook than some middle-school math books, The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure, tells the story of a boy who falls asleep and has a series of math-oriented dreams.

Play a game. Playing number-oriented games is a wonderful way to keep kids practicing their basic computation skills while having fun. If your family is already game-oriented, time spent playing tried-and-true favorites like Yahtzee and Farkle can help boost your family's summer math. There's something to be said for adding up the value of your dice each round! With a bit of research, you can find directions for many other DIY dice-oriented games for math fun, or, for off-the-shelf ease, there are "Math Dice" versions for both younger and older students. In recent years, Set has become a household favorite for many with its pattern-based game play and Sleeping Queens has an unexpected but delightful element of math built into its play strategy, perfect for younger students. (Keep in mind that you can often "level up" your favorite family games to make them more challenging for your family as your students grow and acquire more math skills. Many families make up their own household rules for added fun.)

Tracking money. Tracking allowance, spending, goals, and percentages of savings that are earmarked for special purchases or long-term savings encourages students to use math skills, without them thinking of the task as school-oriented. Based on your child's savings or earnings, ask questions that encourage them to divide, multiple, add, and subtract. Create fictitious story problems that let them think through how much they might have if they buy this or that. Or query how many nickels, for example, a week's allowance is worth.

Counting collections. Whether your student collects baseball cards, comic books, state quarters, or natural objects like leaves, rocks, sea glass, or shells, number opportunities abound. How many do you have? How many of each kind? What percentage of your collection falls into a certain category? Look for the ways in which numbers tie into what your students are already doing. They'll talk about the underlying math as part of their own assessment and tracking of their collection!

Make it a puzzle. A book like Mathemagic!: Number Tricks can be a fun summer selection for students of all ages. The "magic" examples are fascinating and fun to memorize and use with friends and family. The "tricks" also require a good bit of computation to work through the samples and see how and if they work. Multiplication by nines by glancing at your fingers? Nifty!

Watch a video. Downtime screen time can do double duty with math-based videos like those created by Vi Hart. From hands-on exploration and analysis of fruit roll-ups to an analysis of the spirals in pineapples (and SpongeBob!), Hart's videos are eye-opening, mind-boggling, fast-paced, and thought-provoking.

Fun with Numbers
The above suggestions are just a few ways to integrate math-focused activities and number-based thinking into your summer. Keep in mind that your challenge isn't, necessarily, to teach your kids new curriculum. Instead, focus on keeping the wheels turning and keeping them engaged with the "fun" of numbers related to everyday activities and objects. You might just inspire new admiration for all things numeric!

Planes, trains, and automobiles... all great ways to get around. But when it comes to exploring cool travel, the hovercraft shines with its ability to effortlessly glide across land or water. Make one at home to explore the aerodynamics at work!

Remember Luke's land speeder in the original Star Wars trilogy? Remember the way it skimmed across Tatooine's surface of sand as he went in search of R2-D2 and found Obi-Wan? While not necessarily a textbook example of hovercraft technology, the story set in a "galaxy far, far away" did a memorable job in 1977 of showing the potential—and alluring 'glide'—of an air-cushion vehicle (ACV). While the big-screen Star Wars version may have lodged the transportation mode in the public imagination, the first hovercraft, invented by Christopher Cockerell, predates the saga by almost twenty years.

Touted as an environmentally friendly design—it travels mostly above the surface—hovercraft are often associated with water, in part because they have become linked with rescue vehicles. While they are amphibious, hovercraft are not limited to water. Instead, hovercraft are multi-terrain vehicles. The DiscoverHover website describes them as "boat-like vehicles, but they are much more than just a boat, because they can travel over not only water, but grass, ice, mud, sand, snow and swamp as well." The craft's ability to ride on a self-generated and self-maintained cushion of air as it transitions between different terrain is at the heart of the vehicle's innovative aerodynamic design. When hovering, the hull of the craft, which can also float, is lifted off the surface and propelled by a cushion of air that is trapped under the vehicle by a structural "skirt" element.

DIY Hovercraft

Exploring aeronautics principles and design issues related to hovercraft doesn't require a factory, heavy machinery, power tools, or a sophisticated motor. You don't even need wheels! Using materials you probably have around the house, your students can park the die-cast cars for the day and embark on an afternoon's worth of hovercraft racing with their own balloon-powered vehicles.

The simplest hovercraft model can be constructed from a paper plate and a balloon. This model offers a hands-on look at how the craft moves, but repeated travels will probably put a dent in the design. Using foam board instead of a paper plate may increase the longevity of the model. Though thicker than a paper plate, foam board is sturdier and yet still lightweight, an important factor in DIY hovercraft success. If you have a sheet of Elmer's foam board tucked away in a craft closet, your young engineers can experiment with the shape of the craft. Does a circular hovercraft fly farther than a rectangular one? What diameter of circle works best? What is the relationship between the size of the circle and the size of the balloon? Does a foam board hovercraft fly as far as one made from a paper plate? What kinds of modifications can you make to the center where the balloon is stationed?

Recycled compact discs can also be used to make hovercrafts. Pass over a few old CDs, an equal number of drinking bottle valves, some glue, and a pile of balloons in varying sizes, and let your young engineers loose! If you're ready for the races to begin, the "How Does a Hovercraft Work?" project has the blueprint for designing your own miniature hovercraft. You can find additional family-friendly guidance in the CD Hovercraft cartoon from Howtoons. Figuring out what makes the craft hover longer or cover more ground is part of the fun—and part of the science exploration! Make sure to have the video camera ready for some short film footage, just in case there's a finish that's too close to call!

Going Bigger

While building and testing miniature hovercrafts is a great summer activity, especially for elementary (and younger) students, more industrious models are certainly possible and can be excellent under-cover summer projects, perfect for tinkering in the garage. The "Riding on Air—Build a Real Hovercraft" project outlines one approach to creating a leaf-blower powered hovercraft. As part of your background reading, tune in to the DragonFly episode in which Rachel and Sara build their own hovercraft—and troubleshoot problems they encounter on grass. To see another life-size example, check out this video from Howtoons' Saul Griffith.

How well will your hovercraft glide? Put it to the test!

A new online video game design program from the makers of Gamestar Mechanic offers video game enthusiasts the chance to move from player to designer—with the help of industry pros.

Are your students enrolled in camps this summer? From camps that triangulate art, science, and physical play to create a multi-faceted day-to-day experience to specialized camps that offer the ability to focus on a particular subject, hobby, or skill over an extended set of days, summer camps invite exploration through hands-on projects and activities. While lanyard-making still makes an appearance at some camps, the "meat" of many camps lies in their ability to enable an immersive subject- or theme-oriented experience that lets students explore new fields or dive further into areas of high interest.

Offering an à la carte approach to summer, camps have cropped up en masse in recent years to intersect with a wide range of student interests, including LEGO, robotics, science, art, music, cooking, and even skateboarding. In short, if your student has a particular interest or passion, there is likely a camp—even for video game design and programming.


Virtual Summer Camp

E-Line Media, the company behind Gamestar Mechanic, a popular online video game design environment, is giving summer camp a virtual boost with the introduction of a new four-week, online video game design program. Created for students ages 10-14, the flexible program combines the appeal of the Gamestar Mechanic interface as a fun, engaging, and easy-to-learn entry point for kids interested in gaming or game design with the expertise of professional video game designers who will work with and mentor the young game makers. Through a series of exercises and challenges, students will, over the course of the four-week program, further their own design portfolio as they explore and create platform games, adventure games, and action games. The program culminates with each student's creation of a final project, a game that showcases the student's growing skills as a video game designer.


The Story Behind the Virtual Summer Program

Science Buddies caught up with Brian Alspach, Executive Vice President and General Manager for E-Line, to find out more about the summer program.

Q: Gamestar Mechanic does a great job, year-round, of introducing students to fundamental video game design concepts—and hooking them on making their own games. What was the inspiration behind creating a more "class-like" virtual summer program extension and experience?

A: We see lots of young people with an interest in making games. For some, that interest is just beginning, and we think Gamestar Mechanic and the self-moderated learning experience you can have there can help a student with a burgeoning interest get started on a learning pathway in game design. But we do see it as only the start of a pathway, and for kids who want explore that interest more deeply, we want to build out the entire ecosystem around game design. That includes deeper learning experiences like the online summer program.

Q: The summer course is designed with students ages 10-14 in mind. How flexible, or extensible, is the learning opportunity in terms of skill level? Will the course scale and provide both challenge and room to grow for someone who has been building games for a while using Gamestar Mechanic? Or is the course primarily for the beginning game designer?

A: Whether you're a beginning game designer or have some prior experience, the key way to 'level up' is to keep making games and getting feedback on your work. One of the unique things that the summer program offers is an opportunity to do this in a highly scaffolded environment with instructors and game industry pros who are dedicated to working with the young designers and giving them that kind of feedback. It creates a unique opportunity for growth and self-expression around the areas that the aspiring young designer is interested in.

Q: Does the course use Gamestar Mechanic as the sole development environment?

A: It does. At this stage of the online learning, we're trying to keep the focus on game design, both because it's the area where we have the most experience but also because the skills that make someone a good designer tend to be underrepresented in approaches that, say, have kids jump into the technical side of game creation right away. Over time, we'll be expanding our online learning program to include courses that focus on other topics and disciplines within game design—programming, art creation, other game genres, etc..—so this course will serve as a nice entry point to set kids up for those future experiences, too.

Q: By approaching video game design as a 'game,' Gamestar Mechanic makes it easy—and fun—for 'players' to get started with game design. To what degree do you feel the environment prepares students to jump to the next level in game design (e.g., more object-oriented design and programming)?

A: I think approaching it as a game is a great way to build motivation, keep kids engaged, and create opportunities to learn from examples, especially at an early stage. But it really is an entry point to a learning pathway of increasing flexibility in game making, more technical skill being required. If you don't have a solid grounding in design concepts and skills, it's easy to lose your way. These online courses are one way we're approach building out that pathway, and I think this first one in the summer program provides a good starting point.

Q: Based on how the course is structured, what will a typical student exit with in terms of a portfolio of games she has designed?

A: There is a mixture of optional and required game making projects in the course, so students can exit with a portfolio of something like a dozen games by the time they complete the course, with a combination of instructor, pro-designer and peer feedback on all of them.

Q: Pairing aspiring game designers with industry experts is an exciting aspect of the program. How will this component work? Who will the students be working with, and what kinds of interaction can they expect?

A: We think it's a really transformational thing. The kids will have personal instructors, who are educators and students of game design, who will provide coaching and feedback throughout the course. In addition, a subset of their game design assignments will be reviewed by 'game pros'—real folks working in the game industry as designers, producers, artists, etc.... We've got a really neat format where the pros playtest the students' games and video capture their play along with a PIP window with them giving their feedback. The kids get to see a pro react to their game in real time and get suggestions on how to improve it.

Q: What is most exciting to you about this new summer program?

A: For me, the opportunity to connect kids with mentorship and coaching from the instructors and pros is really compelling. If you're a kid with an interest in, say, sports or music, there are tons of support structures you can draw on to help you along the way. That doesn't exist for the most part if your interest is in making games, so we're excited to be taking our first steps to help create some of them.

Creating a batch of homemade putty puts polymers in the palm of your hand. This family science activity may inspire nostalgia, but your kids will have a blast exploring the tactile medium.

When you think of the comics from the Sunday paper, as they were during your childhood, what comes to mind? (If you are under 30, ask your parents or a teacher!) First, they were in color, a novel weekend change from the daily black and white. Even if newspaper comics are really targeted for the adult, sit-with-the-paper-and-a-cup-of-coffee crowd, there is a certain allure to them for kids, especially in the slightly washed tones that were once the colors de jour of the Sunday edition. If memories of a stretchy, slightly hard but malleable wad of flesh-colored putty piggybacks on your childhood memories of the Sunday paper, don't feel bad. I'm right there with you. For some reason, when I think of Silly Putty®, I think of the Sunday comics, and vice versa. The Silly Putty timeline puts things in a bit of historical perspective, with Crayola acquiring the rights to Silly Putty during my childhood, followed by a resurgence of interest in the stretchy, bouncy medium and its egg-shaped containers in the 80s. What I didn't know back then was that the stretchy putty is actually a great example of science and what can happen when molecules link together in long repeating chains.

What Came First

The story of Silly Putty is one with a take-to-heart moral for scientists and engineers of all ages: invention sometimes is the result of an accident or a failed experiment. Or, in science project terms, what you discover when your hypothesis is disproven might be even more exciting than what you were hoping to discover! The second-level moral surely has something to do with having one's eyes open to unexpected possibilities.

Silly Putty was first created during World War II by researchers who were trying to develop synthetic alternatives to rubber, an important commodity that was rationed during the war. While more than one researcher claims the initial discovery, Crayola lists James Wright, who worked for General Electric, as the inventor. What Wright (at GE) and another team (at Dow Corning) had separately discovered in their labs was that a combination of boric acid and silicone oil yielded a stretchy substance that bounced when dropped. Despite its unusual (and entertaining) properties, the putty wasn't a viable alternative to rubber. No good use for the putty was found, in fact, until a toy store owner saw it and realized its tactile potential—as a toy. The familiar egg-shaped container came later, along with more than a quarter million units sold in three days, and the rest, as they say, is history, although the putty's path from the lab into popular culture didn't happen overnight. Though Silly Putty didn't enjoy simple rocket-to-the-top success, it did shuttle to the moon with the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968. Today, the putty even has a spot at the Smithsonian Institute.

Making Connections

While Silly Putty, from the store, can be a fun and inexpensive diversion for the kids, putty is one of many DIY mediums you can mix at home for a quirky, crafty, scientific experience that's perfect for the family, spans a range of ages, and gives everyone something to play with afterwards. Other interesting tactile substances you can concoct at home include Ooblek and Gak. While different in nature, the three together make a powerful trio for summer fun and hands-on kid science. Be forewarned, however, that differences in printing and ink technologies may make it hard to replicate your childhood Sunday comics memories. The nostalgia you may have when working with the Elmer's® school glue, on the other hand, may more than make up for it. For your kids, you'll be highlighting some important science concepts that help explain how many materials we use every day are created. Plus, the outcome of the project is a wad of goo with a small amount of slime-factor that can stretch, bounce, and squoosh. For certain age groups, it doesn't get much better than that!

Silly Science

Substances like Silly Putty are part of a class of materials called polymers. Like other molecules, polymers are compounds, but they are large and may contain tens of thousands of atoms. Compare this, for example, to water, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen that contains three atoms. A good way to visual the difference between small molecules (like water) and polymers (also called macromolecules) is to think of the size difference between a crystal of salt (small) and a strand of spaghetti (larger and longer).* Like the strand of spaghetti, polymers are long chains of molecules strung together. These strands can also be tangled up to create a giant mess of polymer chains. Are you still envisioning a bowl of spaghetti?

Part of what makes polymers interesting is that each polymer has unique properties and behaviors defined by its molecules. Some polymers are stretchy. Some are sticky. Some are hard. Many familiar and commonly used polymers are synthetic, but there are also naturally occurring polymers, including cellulose, starch, proteins, silk, chitin, and rubber. What you want your putty-mixers to understand is that Silly Putty has its characteristic stretch and bounce because of the molecules from which it is made.

Bring on the Polymers

Using a combination of Elmer's white school glue, borax (a cleaner made from sodium tetraborate), and water, you can create a substance similar to Silly Putty. The polymer in DIY putty is not the same as in a commercially sold egg-container of Silly Putty, but glue and borax react to form a similar polymer structure. One of the ingredients in Elmer's glue is polyvinyl acetate—a polymer. When you combine Elmer's glue with borax, a chemical reaction occurs, and borax molecules create links between molecules of polyvinyl acetate in the glue. As more and more cross-linked molecules form, the polymer begins to take on new properties—and new substance. Since you wouldn't pick up and play with a handful of glue, you know that something has happened in the mixing because your putty isn't sticky like glue.

Figuring out the optimal ratio of glue to borax is a great science exploration for students. As you mix up separate batches with varying amounts of the two main ingredients, you can compare the differences in the resulting substances. If you want to focus on a single batch until you determine a formula that feels and works well, start with a single recipe from one of the sources below and add small amounts of the borax solution until you reach the desired consistency. Just be sure and work the borax into the glue solution well each time so that it mixes thoroughly before you add more! (Tip: have your students take the putty from the bag, feel it, stretch it, and manipulate it with their hands to evaluate the consistency. Is it too sticky? Is it too hard to squish? Does it break too easily?)

The following resources can help guide your exploration. The full Science Buddies Project Idea can be used during science fair season, but the general procedure gives you a blueprint for turning the project into an exciting family activity:

• Bouncy Polymer Chemistry
• Playing with Polymers (this adaptation of the Science Buddies Project Idea appears in Scientific American's Bring Home Science)

Squishy Fun

Be prepared for some experimental zaniness after the putty is mixed. Once students get past the initial sensation of how the putty "feels" in their hands, seeing what happens when you do "this" or "that" with the putty is part of the fun and part of the science-based observation the activity inspires. All you have to do to turn up the volume as they squish the putty around in their hands is ask: does it bounce?



Note: Dispose of your glue and borax waste in a trash bag, not down the sink.

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^* Spaghetti analogy appears in Carnegie Mellon's Introduction to Polymers.

If your readers are fans of one comic format or another, you may find that science-themed manga titles are a welcome addition to your younger and middle students' summer reading lists.

In my house, manga and the graphic novel format rule. For years, my students have been devouring manga titles, a reality that made me even more thankful for the library early on when I realized they were zipping through titles in under an hour—and ready for more. With some favorite series containing 40-50 volumes, we've put our library account to sizzling use through the years. Although there's no Da Vinci-esque script involved, my students read backwards with the same ease as they do forwards.

While there are themes they prefer, I've discovered that their affinity for the genre—and the comic format—crosses all boundaries. We've read through the graphic novel shelves at the library and broadened our appreciation of traditional-style comics with healthy doses of classic and unforgettable strips like Calvin and Hobbes. Their willingness to read virtually anything presented in panels opens up exciting terrain when it comes to science content.

Cartoon-style Science

Many students, even students who are excellent readers, enjoy the comic genre (at large), which makes it wonderful that there are increasing numbers of titles available, including a wide range of science-themed graphic novels. There are cartoon-style collections of project ideas, comic book stories of science clubs and science-studded plots, biographies presented in graphic novel format, and illustrated guides devoted to major areas of science.

Earlier this week, we posted a super-sized list of great summer reading selections for older students and adults from the popular science shelves. That list included Feynman, a graphic novel biography of Richard Feynman, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and known for his eccentric personality, spotlighted both in famous classroom lectures and in a series of autobiographical titles. For readers with an interest in physics, quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, and nanotechnology, Feynman may be an interesting launching point. As a follow-up—or a starting point in a different area of science—these titles from the "Manga Guide" series are ones your middle-to-upper-grade students might enjoy over the summer as a supplement to some hands-on exploration.

• The Manga Guide to Physics
• The Manga Guide to Electricity
• The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology
• The Manga Guide to Relativity
• The Manga Guide to the Universe
• The Manga Guide to Biochemistry

Loose Science
When it comes to full-color graphic novels aimed at the younger audience and with few illusions of being truly educational, there are a range of titles for students to latch onto. From the Amulet series to Jellaby and Zita the Spacegirl, the genre is brimming with books to entice young and middle readers. Because many of these stories are quasi-science fiction in nature, science often lurks within, even if it isn't center stage. Reading about characters who are scientists, explorers, and inventors is a fun alternative to other character archetypes and might help engage students in their own science exploration—and in the possibilities offered by science-related career paths. Even Babymouse did a stint as a scientist before the team behind the series introduced Squish, the school-aged, Twinkie-eating amoeba who stars in a series dubbed "a tale of microscopic proportions" (see Super Amoeba, Brave New Pond, and The Power of the Parasite).

When science is presented as cool, fun, and often-accompanied by a bang, a bit of time travel, or a world-changing discovery, there's fertile ground for the imagination—and for growing awareness of science. For fun downtime reads for your middle readers, books that offer less textbook science and more story, you might consider graphic novels like The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook, Knights of the Lunch Table: The Dodgeball Chronicles (there's a science teacher in the mix), and The Knights of the Lunch Table #2: The Dragon Players (building robots takes center stage). Similarly, the titles in the Daniel Boom AKA Loud Boy series also have science, engineering, and invention as underlying themes. The kids who are part of this group each have a questionable super ability, but you'll find that there's something scientific afoot in each adventure. Or, for a greener spin on the graphic novel, Luz Sees the Light explores the importance of sustainability and reducing one's reliance on fossil fuels.

A Taste for More Traditional Books?

While the graphic novel format seems to have gone viral for many school-age readers, the format isn't for everyone. We'll be posting a list of summer choices for chapter books and novels for elementary and middle readers. Here are a few non-comic titles to get you and your students started:

• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (fictional story of a young naturalist)
• Doyle and Fossey, Science Detectives (see our review)
• Who Was Thomas Alva Edison? (or Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, etc.)
• The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe
• The Case of the Vanishing Golden Frogs: A Scientific Mystery
• The Magic School Bus series (Who can resist Ms. Frizzle and her science-traveling school bus? Look for chapter book versions for your elementary school readers.)
• Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci
• Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot or other titles from the Scientists in the Field Series
• Science Fair (a Dave Barry tale that puts a science fair project in the middle of an international espionage plot)

We would love to hear about science-themed titles you and your students enjoy!

Building paths for marbles to race, climb, and loop brings physics to heart-pounding life—minus the admission fee, height requirement, and endless wait in line. A willingness to uncover principles of energy and laws of motion is required; cotton candy is optional.

One of my family's favorite stopping spots at the Exploratorium, our local science museum, is the "Tinkering Studio" where a pegboard wall, bins of low-tech building materials, and rolls of masking tape are available for impromptu marble-run construction. The build-at-will lab is nestled in the far back corner of the museum, but it's a beeline destination for many. The perpetual hands-on exhibit invites kids of all ages to position ramps and tubes so that a marble will roll down one length, drop to another, and continue, hopefully, until it lands in some form of cup at the bottom. Some kids build small-scale runs, content to see the marble make it through one or two connections and into the cup. Others create more sophisticated runs, testing and re-testing to correct angles and positioning as they work on perfecting their layouts. Always, the energy in the air is exciting, and when a kid stands up, holds a marble over the starting point for a final run, and sees the construction succeed, the marble rattling to its final stop in a plastic bin at the bottom, the reward is clear: I made it work.

Having seeing how immersive this kind of building can be, I have often thought it would be amazing to line a hallway or bedroom wall with pegboard for this purpose at home. There are many ways to transform a household wall into a space for creativity, invention, and hands-on, perpetual discovery. At various points, I considered both magnetic and chalkboard walls, but marble runs may have more longevity in terms of kid interest. With their quirky and wide-ranging assortment of parts and components and anything-goes aplomb, run building , captivates and challenges both tape-happy younger students and older students with a developing thirst for structural finesse. Whether you take a DIY approach and put together your own wall-based, standalone, or travel-ready kit, or whether you invest in a ready-made marble run or rollercoaster building kit, these kinds of activities, an extension, maybe, of early fascination with brick and block building, are great for letting kids explore principles of physics and engineering.

The Roller Coaster Connection

While angles and trajectories are critical to a marble run's success, the path usually moves in one direction, top to bottom, and any quasi-lateral rolls probably still involve a bit of a decline. Roller coasters, on the other hand, often climb, drop, and climb again, which requires different energy and momentum. What makes a ride thrilling in person is often a combination of speed and stomach-lurching looping, a combination that relies upon and illustrates Newton's laws of motion and conservation of energy. Students who love to ride roller coasters can turn summer amusement park thrills into an informal physics exploration with a homemade vertical accelerometer using "The Chills and Thrills of Roller-Coaster Hills" project. Take the tool along for the ride and measure the g-force at different locations during the ride. Be prepared to ride several times in a row to gather data!

Using the DIY accelerometer to collect g-force measurements gives validity to riding "just one more time" at the amusement park, but once home again, there's plenty of thrilling science to recreate with a DIY roller coaster made from foam tubing. The "Roller Coaster Marbles: Converting Potential Energy to Kinetic Energy" physics project guides students through construction and the tracking of potential energy as it is converted to kinetic energy during a marble's path from start to finish. The same tubing can be used to investigate the math upon which coaster loops depend. The "Roller Coaster Marbles: How Much Height to Loop the Loop?" project explores the ratio between height and loop size. It wouldn't be much fun if you got halfway up the loop only to slip back to the base and stall, right?

Making Connections

Perfect for at-home exploration, marble runs and roller coaster experiments fall in line with bridge building, tower construction, and even exploration of simple machines. What will your students construct this summer?

Your students need to keep reading—all summer long. Reading helps fight summer brain drain, but if you encourage your students to read books with a science theme, the pages read do double duty. And you? If a popular science title isn't what you would typically grab for a vacation read, it might be time to shake up your summer reading. Science Buddies staff offers suggestions for engaging science-themed reads for tweens and up.

As our elementary school principal wrapped up his "morning circle" announcements a few weeks ago on the last day of school, he closed with: "And students, don't forget to read this summer. Every day." There were a few token groans around the circle, but I couldn't help but smile, happy to have had the critical importance of summer reading highlighted in that way—as a reminder to parents as well as to students. Statistics are clear that reading and math are two areas of learning at the most risk over the summer. I'm sure it's no coincidence that public libraries around the country offer prize-laden summer reading programs as incentive to keep kids reading. I remember a "bookworm" club years and years ago. When it comes to reading, not much has changed. What has changed is the availability of so many other things to do, to schedule, and to flip on, all of which can put time spent with a nose in a book on the back burner, for students and adults alike.

No matter what activities, vacations, camps, or schedules you keep during the swathe of summer days, make sure there is plenty of reading going on. As you help your students choose books and encourage them to read a few more chapters, be on the lookout for great science picks. Mix daily reading with science-themed books, and what do you get? The combination can be a recipe for exciting, immersive, eye-opening, mind-expanding summer reading. We encourage plenty of hands-on science exploration over the summer, both small ones and longer-term ones that bridge the days and develop throughout the break. But reading about science can also broaden a student's frame of reference and open up new paths of potential interest—for everyone in the family! Set a great example, and stock your own to-read shelf with some of today's most exciting popular science titles.

"Checking Out" Science

After reading Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, a Robot Named Scorch... and What It Takes to Win last month and finding myself really caught up in the stories of the students profiled, I started pulling a wide range of science-themed books from the library shelves. In recent weeks, I have been surrounded by piles of science and math titles, stacks of books brimming with information on nests, spirals, chemistry, physics, poisons, biology, and more. With each one I picked up, I found myself hooked in different ways.

Nests: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them has been open next to me for a number of days. The book is a beautiful collection of photos of birds nests—and their eggs. If you think all nests are woven baskets of twigs, you will find Nests an eye-opening and wonderful exploration of the amazing diversity, artistry, innovation, resourcefulness, adaptation, and sheer functionality encapsulated in the nests made by different kinds of birds. Twigs, man-made debris, saliva and spider webs only tap the surface of the range of materials used in nest construction, and each species builds nests that tell a story, in part, of the local habitat. Accompanying Beals' photos are short but thorough profiles of each species covering nest-building, mating, parenting, migration, and other distinguishing characteristics. This is a book birders of all ages, life-list or not, can savor.

Intrigued by the bevvy of kitchen chemistry titles on the market, I cracked open the pages of What Einstein Told His Cook 2, one of a series of books from Robert Wolke. In this volume, Wolke tackles a broad spectrum of questions from readers of his Washington Post column in categories like beverages, dairy and eggs, vegetables, seafood, and grains and carbohydrates. In response to seemingly simple but earnest questions, some of which bring up family kitchen lore handed down through the ages, Wolke explains the science that underlies everyday observations you can make in the kitchen. Wolke's approach targets the casual science reader and kitchen enthusiast. You might find an answer to a question you've wondered about, or an answer to something you've noticed but never thought to question. Ever asked why tea stored in the refrigerator turns cloudy?

What to Read

After scanning titles, reviews, and book blurbs on some favorite science-related and bookseller sites, I had scores of amazing-sounding titles I wanted to look up, check out, thumb through, curl up with, or share with my own students. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, with its glow-in-the-dark cover, might be next on my to-read list, but I've also been wanting to read something by Jane Goodall, and my own interests leave me curious to see Field Notes on Science & Nature. Some titles are just tantalizing and intriguing, like Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History and The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. But then there are titles exposing the dark side of plants, the underbelly of poison, and a beekeeper's efforts to save the bees. With so many popular science titles vying for attention, I asked the Science Buddies staff to share favorite titles they recommend for both high-school readers and adults. Their suggestions, shown below, contain both new and classic titles from popular science, and even a perennial science fiction favorite, that you and your older students may enjoy. We would love to hear your favorite science titles as well!

While you shouldn't always judge a book by its cover, here's our list of suggestions for summer science reading:

We will be posting other lists of some of our favorite middle and K-5 titles, including some graphic novels and manga, and some suggested math titles, so stay tuned!

Student "brain drain" during the summer is more than just media hype. Statistics on academic loss offer a cautionary tale, but taking steps to infuse summer fun with summer science can help keep critical skills in motion. Summer science might be just the synapse boost your student needs to bridge the days between school years!

With the final bell of the school year, summer break begins. The kids may be all cheers, but for parents, the sprawl of long summer days can pose a number of challenges. Part logistical and part practical, you may find yourself wondering, what will they do all summer? Even if your calendar is already studded with family vacation and a smattering of summer camps, there is probably still a stretch of free-form days ahead, more days off than on.

If you feel torn trying to sort out how to balance the need to pay tribute to the "break" of summer and still keep your kids' brains on track, you are not alone. Summer shakes up familiar routines and schedules. Bedtimes may get an extension, and TVs might get more airtime, but even as you give your kids some needed downtime, keep in mind that research shows that school-age children are at risk of losing up to two months of learning over the summer. It's a startling statistic, one that should be a motivator for parents. Letting your students get sucked into a summer daze can have repercussions in the coming school year, so take extra care in making sure that summer activities offer a nice balance of "just for fun" and "fun with an educational twist."

Science That Isn't for an Assignment

Creating opportunities throughout the summer that use important reading and math skills is important, and longer summer days and less structured schedules can add up to perfect opportunities for science exploration and exciting science activities that let your students have fun while putting cognitive and creative skills to use. With no "classroom" assignment to rein them in, summer gives students the chance to explore science questions and topics of their own choosing and without needing to juggle other homework. Summer science is about the science, not the grade, a simple reality that frees students up to explore—just because. With no project display board requirement and no research paper to turn in, students get to dive in and enjoy the fun part—the hands-on investigation.

Kickstart a Summer Science Exploration

During the school year, thousands of students use Science Buddies Project Ideas for class assignments and science fairs. Many of these projects are also great for at-home exploration, either solo or as a family activity. The following suggestions highlight a few summer-friendly science explorations from our library of Project Ideas:

• Shimmy Shimmy Soda Pop: Develop Your Own Soda Pop Recipe: Mix up and sample your own carbonated beverages while you explore the chemical reaction that occurs when you mix baking soda and citric acid. How much of each ingredient do you need to create the perfect drink? What happens to the drink when the amounts of each ingredients change? What does it mean for a soda to be flat? Can your bubbly soda be too bubbly? Have you ever dumped lemonade crystals into a bottle of carbonated water and had it bubble up and overflow the bottle? Have you twisted the lid off of a bottle of homemade seltzer and had the cap fly into the air? What's going on? This food science project is perfect for the aspiring chemist, the kitchen scientist, or even the chef-in-training.




• Build Your Own Crystal Radio: Get hands on in this electronics project and wire your own crystal radio to pick up AM stations without plugs or batteries. What stations can you tap in your neighborhood? This project is a great exploration for the budding electrician or electronics enthusiast. Turn things around, and you can make your own DIY transmitter to learn more about how radio stations are broadcast. Really ambitious? Go full circle and set up your own crystal radio to pick up your own transmissions!




• Rocketology: Baking Soda + Vinegar = Lift Off!: For some students, science fun in the sun is all about things that pop, boom, float, or fly. This chemistry project gives new zest—and combustion—to experiments with baking soda and vinegar. The volcanoes in the sand you remember from your preschool days were fun, but this project kicks things up a notch. What's not to love about blasting empty film canisters into the air? For more explosive fun, try Coke® & Mentos®—Nucleation Goes Nuclear!. What's the difference between a chemical reaction and a physical reaction? This soda geyser can help you find out.




• The Chemistry of Clean: Make Your Own Soap to Study Soap Synthesis: A great choice for the DIY-type, the aspiring chemist, or the soap enthusiast, this chemistry project explores the process of making soap—and how you "purify" soap using salt. If mixing up custom, non-edible concoctions is up your student's alley, you might also encourage making lip balm or exploring the art of making perfume.

  
  

• Veggie Power!: This energy-focused exploration of fruits and vegetables as power sources is excellent for the "green"-minded student and electronics fan. What kinds of foods generate the most power? Head to the produce aisle for an assortment of fruits and vegetables you can put to the test. What can you power with foods from the vegetable bin?




• Do You Have the Willpower to Taste Something Sour?: Mix up batches of lemonade and put your family and friend's sour power to the test. What trends can you spot? Combine this project with Shimmy, Shimmy Soda Pop (above) for added twist, or take it a step further with the "Do You Love the Taste of Food? Find Out if You're a Supertaster!" project. Put an end to dinner-table arguments about what's too salty, too spicy, or too sour by figuring out just how many taste buds you have. Is anyone in your family a supertaster? A bit of blue food coloring can reveal your tongue's papillae truth.




• Got video game?: If spending time playing one video game or another is how you plan to spend a large chunk of your summer, why not shake things up and create your own game? Put what you already know about what makes a game great into developing your own game for friends and family to try. Tools like GameMaker can help get you started, and younger designers can get a fun introduction to video game design basics by completing quests and building games in Gamestar Mechanic. For a more immersive summer video game design experience, check out Gamestar Mechanic's new four-week summer online learning program. Designed especially for students ages 10-14, the online course extends the Gamestar Mechanic experience and gives students the benefit of working with a professional game design mentor.




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  The Chills and Thrills of Roller-Coaster Hills: If you'll be hitting the coasters at an amusement park, this project will guide you in building and using a homemade accelerometer you can take along to learn more about acceleration and gravity on your favorite rides. Which rides are most thrilling—and why? For more hands-on fun exploring the science behind roller coasters, build an at-home marble run. Grab some foam tubing, and create your own monster marble ride! The potential energy is there, ready and waiting, for a super summer investigation!




• How Sweet It Is! Explore the Roles of Color and Sugar Content in Hummingbirds' Food Preferences.: For the backyard birder or budding zoologist, this project lets you turn your window-view into a simple zoology experiment. What happens if you offer different colors of food to hummingbirds? Is the color most important? Or is the amount of sugar what really counts? Set up some testing feeders and see what happens! You can also experiment with bird seed to learn more about the preferences of birds in your area.

Several of the Project Ideas listed above are available in kit format. Ordering a Science Buddies Kit makes it easy to hand over a box of science goodness to an older student. Everything you need (except perishable items) will arrive in the box!

Investigate a Hobby

If your students spend summer days pursuing a favorite pastime or sport, encourage them to explore, question, test, and think about the science at work behind their favorite activities.

From golf swings to baseball bats to RC helicopters, learning more about the underlying science might help improve their skills. For the DIY-minded, making paper, making markers, and dyeing fabric all blend creativity and science—and they will have something they made when they are done! Creating sunprints can also tap an artsy side while letting them more about the colors of light—and an early approach to photography. If your student would rather be behind the camera, nudge her to try some key lens tests or go primitive and experiment with a pinhole camera to get a back-to-basics understanding of exposure—and a crash course in the history of photography!

Summer Reading

As one of the two academic areas most at risk during the summer months, daily reading is a summer must. As you and your students scour the shelves and reading lists for summer choices, be sure and pepper the list with science-themed titles. From fiction with a science twist to accessible, engaging, and potentially mind-boggling non-fiction titles, there are great science choices for students of all ages. Stay tuned for our suggested summer reading list for older readers and for parents!

Science for All Ages

While you may want to encourage your older students to tackle independent summer science investigations, summer is a great time for family science activities that can be fun for all ages. Our list of Project Ideas for Home contains suggestions for easy-to-do projects that don't take a lot of preparation, don't take long to complete, and can be done with basic household materials you might already have on hand. Many of these are perfect for doing with younger students. You will also find family-centered adaptations of Science Buddies projects at Scientific American's Bring Science Home.

Stay Tuned

We will be highlighting other summer science ideas in the coming days and weeks! We would love to know what you try, what projects your family does, what science books you read, and how you and your students keep the science learning going all summer long. Share your stories by sending email to amy@sciencebuddies.org. Have a picture to go along with your summer science fun? We'd love to see!

Families who gather around the table to eat turn off the electronics, put down their books, pass the salt, salad, or main course, and tune in to one another. With busy schedules carving out the hours of the days for both students and parents, the minutes shared over a meal give everyone a moment to slow down, regroup, and refocus. Working a bit of science into your dinner table talk can be easy—and rewarding for everyone involved.

When you think of "family dinner," you probably aren't alone if some larger-than-life image of a perfect, smiling family comes to mind. Many Generation X parents carry a mental image of family dinner that's a sitcom amalgamation of the Cleavers, the Bradys, and the Cosbys, all rolled into one. Depending on the state of your own dining table, that image might seem to be one of mythic and unattainable proportions, or maybe it's the kind of image that keeps you going as you strive to put in place healthy, happy, and meaningful routines for your family.

For years, the media has depicted family mealtime as a mark of a "happy" family, and nutritionist and child education experts alike have chimed in on the importance of the family meal. Proponents of eating together cite studies that show long-term benefits ranging from academic achievement to healthier eating and better social choices among teenagers. In an age where the family dinner could run the risk of seeming old-fashioned, the idea appears to be alive and well, a reality boosted by the fact that President Obama and his family, too, observe a family meal. Despite busy schedules and the ongoing proliferation of fast food places, many families do have a routine of shared meals, expect members of the family to be home and at the table for dinner most nights, and view dinner as a cornerstone of family interaction.

Steering Table Talk

What families discuss over dinner varies table to table. Some families share stories of school, the team, friends, extended family, or the day at the office. Some families talk about headline news. Some families share a "high" and a "low" for the day. Some dinner conversations are simply free-form or free-for-all. Part of what time together at the table offers is a window for family members to talk to each other. But what happens when conversation wanes? If you want your family dinners to succeed, being prepared with ideas for "table talk" can be as important as deciding what to serve.

Luckily, with a bit of forethought, it can be easy to uplevel dinner table talk into something meaningful beyond, "what's the green stuff in my pasta?" While your meals shouldn't turn into a classroom lecture, family dinner can provide a perfect opportunity to spend an extra five minutes talking about science with your kids. It doesn't take much preparation to bring a wholesome nugget of science or engineering to the table. Do it subtly, as moms do, and your kids might not even recognize that you're charted new territory at the dinner table, squeezing a bit of chemistry or engineering trivia in between the school gossip and the talk of weekend plans.

Pass the Science, Please

These tips can help you find easy ways to increase the neurons firing around the table. Go ahead and share "highs" and "lows." It's important to check in with your kids—and yourself. But with just a bit of a stretch, you can turn "pass the salt" into something that might generate an aha moment, might raise a question about how the world works, might inspire further research or experimentation, or might let your student show off something learned this year. You might even find that science talk leads to some very funny and exciting conversations!

• Dish Up a Simple Fact: Often all it takes to kickstart a good conversation is a morsel of knowledge you can toss into the air and see where it falls. Our "Today in Science History" posts (at Facebook) are perfect examples of the kinds of bite-sized trivia you can share with your kids at the table. The fact itself may be finite: "this person was born on this day in x year and is best known for y and z." But the discussion can be much more open ended. Often, I tell my kids something about what I learned about a famous inventor or scientist that I've researched to write the science history tidbit for the day. Sometimes, I tell them simply to highlight an interesting biography so that they hear about all kinds of different careers and about people who made discoveries and inventions even as teens or tweens. Did you know that Mary Anning found her first full skeleton when she was only 12? Did you know that Philo Farnsworth was a teen when he first hypothesized the "television"—and he got his inspiration from looking at a field!

  
  Sometimes, you may find that your students already know a bit about the person or fact you bring to the table. That's great! When I brought up Richter's birthday and asked my boys if they knew what he developed, my fifth grader had his own question. Did you know that Richter got the credit for the Richter scale but someone else actually worked with him? The nice thing about the science history blurbs is that they are short and compact, and yet they highlight a potentially cool person, an area of science, and something of historical significance.




• Make It a Game: Turning science trivia into a table game can be a lot of fun, especially if you are a game-oriented family or your kids respond enthusiastically to friendly competition and the chance to show off what they know. Dust off the box of Trivial Pursuit cards lurking on the top shelf of your closet and put them to use! Or, try a set of science-themed flash or trivia cards like Prof. Noggin's Wonders of Science. These cards can be perfect for dinner, but be careful if you think you'll just do one or two a day. Your kids might enjoy the game of it and zip through a bunch of cards before asking for seconds. (Note: cards like these may not offer any explanatory info—just trivia.)

  Keeping a book of "must know" science facts on hand can also offer a fresh flow of information. Check out books like 101 Things Everyone Should Know About Science (2006) or Scientific American's Ask the Experts: Answers to The Most Puzzling and Mind-Blowing Science Questions (2003). The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated Guide takes a slightly different, non-Q&A approach, but each statement (and accompanying illustration) is sized just right for raising family conversation. Which books will work for your family may depend on the ages of your students and your family interests, but books like these often pose a question or fact—and then offer a detailed answer or explanation. This approach may work better than simple trivia questions for younger students.

  If science, in general, feels too broad to get you started, consider focusing on a theme, like the Periodic Table. Grab a guide like The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, or the related deck of Periodic Table cards, and start exploring. For kids that like to memorize facts, there are a bunch of angles to master, from the organization of the table to element symbols, numbers, and identifying details. What to do: gather trivia sources, just be careful to look for current sources (or be on the lookout for things that may have changed). For example, a book or game card that still cites Pluto as a planet is worthy of an out-of-this-world dessert discussion. Your kids may even be entertained by hearing about the mnemonic device you learned in school for memorizing the order of the planets—back when there were nine pizzas to serve! Talking about mnemonic devices is a perfect add-on dinner topic! If you have older kids, try having each be responsible for scrounging up an interesting or "new-to-me" science fact on a certain night of the week.




• Headline News: Make room in your own newspaper reading, news watching, or social media following to stay in sync with science news, events, and discoveries. Knowing that the Venus Transit is coming before it happens lets you talk about it and make a plan for safe viewing. (There's some math to figure, too. How old will you be before it comes again?) When news about arsenic levels in brown rice hit the papers, it was a perfect time to talk not only about the science at hand but about the history of arsenic. Filling your kids in on the notable history of arsenic could prove to be an eye-opening meal starter! What to do: add key science media streams to your social media spots, like Facebook or Twitter, including National Geographic, NASA, Discovery, Scientific American, and Science Buddies. Depending on where you live, be sure and add local sources, too, like KQED QUEST in the Bay Area. Still read the paper paper? Clip interesting tidbits and bring them to dinner!




• Read Science Writing: Science writers help open up the world of science in ways that illuminate and explain all the nooks and crannies of science. These writers translate and transform research coming from the labs and science headlines from around the world into stories for the general reader. Whether the subject of the story is frightening, awe inspiring, cautionary, or revolutionary, even sharing an opening passage to a well-crafted and engaging science essay can open up all kinds of discussion (and maybe even a vocabulary lesson or two!). Try essays from NY Times Science writers like Carl Zimmer or Carol Kaesuk Yoon, or blog posts from Scientific American, to get a taste of dazzling prose that brings science to life. What to do: print out a paragraph or two, bring it to the table, and have someone read it. See what conversations evolve.

  
  

• Encourage Inventive Thinking: In addition to talking about experiments and results, mix things up a bit sometimes by posing a hypothetical problem. For example, you might ask, What could we create that would take care of "this" problem? Being able to act on the idea isn't a requirement. Just brainstorm what might work and why. Think about what went into coming up with using PET bottles as a way to disinfect water using the power of the sun. It was an inventive solution—and one that can be used to help improve drinking water around the world. Your family challenge discussions can be smaller-scale. A recent Science Buddies success story highlights a fifth-grade student who wanted to create a video game to share with his grandmother, who is blind. Another story features a student who wondered what kind of reusable water bottle she should use to reduce her exposure to germs. Ryan Patterson, one of the science fair success legends profiled in Science Fair Season,developed a robotic glove to help deaf people have more privacy in conversations. Nutshell stories like these can help inspire creative thinking and problem solving, but try tossing out a new challenge. How can we solve this? How could this be improved? What to do: come up with a stash of challenges that require assimilation of knowledge and creative problem solving.




• Surprise Them: Sometimes the best way to generate discussion is to shock your students with a science fact that seems hard to believe or even impossible. For example, did you know a polar bear's fur is transparent? Or, go really far out: Did you know that a thimbleful of a neutron would weigh as much as a skyscraper? (You might also find this fact written in terms of a number of elephants, which may be more fun to ponder!) What to do: search for fun or odd-but-true science facts you can dole out at dinner. The Library of Congress' Everyday Mysteries section can launch you in the direction of the unexpected when you need to kickstart the science conversation.




• Know Your Family: Putting more science on the menu doesn't mean you have to be limited to classroom facts and trivia. One way to make science engaging for you and your children as a topic of conversation is to talk about the science involved in their areas of interest or hobbies. An Angry Birds obsession can yield an interesting discussion of video games and physics, and news of a camera body made out of LEGO gives both the photographer and the builder something to ponder. Whether they fly RC helicopters, play the piano, veg out with video games, love detective books, or are amazing visual artists, there are science facts and science angles you can talk about—which will help them learn to find and explore the science that underwrites everything they do! What to do: talk about what they already love, but ask questions that encourage thinking about how things work and why.
  

Your Own Recipe

The above suggestions are just a few ideas to get you going. There are many, many more ways you can weave science talk into your meals. In a Washington Post article earlier this year, Casey Seidenberg suggests creating a "jar" of dinner table conversation starters. This would be a great way to stay ahead of your family meals and create your own custom blend of science topics gathered from some of the above sources. After a few science game nights, bring out the jar and pull out a science talk starter. Or make pulling a topic the way you kick off each meal.

Whether you are already a family that eats together or think it's worth a try, we know that with a bit of experimentation, you'll find your own perfect recipe for dinner table science success! We would enjoy hearing about your family discussions, what you try, what books and games you find that help keep your dinner talk educational, science-minded, and entertaining. Send your suggestions and stories to: amy@sciencebuddies.org.

The Venus Transit offers a wonderful opportunity for family summer science and an easy DIY science activity—making a pinhole viewer. From parallax to exoplanets, tomorrow's transit raises plenty of talking points for students and their families, but a safe viewing strategy is a must.

This afternoon, our family science activity will involve cardboard and aluminum foil as we make a pinhole viewer in hopes of catching tomorrow's Venus Transit. Given the sad-but-true tale of our pinhole tube projector attempt last month for the eclipse, we will be making and trying a shoebox pinhole viewer this time—and hoping for much better results. Having briefly viewed the eclipse through a shoebox viewer another group brought to the top of the hill where we were struggling to catch an image through our makeshift tube projector, we have a good sense of how small our viewing of the Venus Transit will be—and with a transit, unlike an eclipse, Venus will appear only as a small dot as it crosses the surface of the Sun. Still, we're hoping for clear skies and a clear view.

Pinhole Planning

In preparation for the coming transit, I spent time talking with Terik Daly, Staff Scientist at Science Buddies and a doctoral student studying planetary science at Brown University. In part, I wanted to know how off-base we had been with our viewer attempt last month.

After reading through my account of our viewer, Daly confirms, much to my relief, that in theory what we tried should have worked. Something went wrong, but the concept was sound—and we were able to cast the Sun during the afternoon, just not later during the actual eclipse. (I still think the heavy winds at the top of the hill didn't help us—or our taped-together cardboard tubes, which seemed even more flimsy when held up into the wind.) Daly did note that aluminum foil, because it is opaque and highly reflective, might have increased our chances of success.

What's the Big Deal?

The Venus Transit is a 243-year cycle, arriving in pairs, eight years apart, separated by first 121.5 years and then by 105.5 years. The last Venus Transit was on June 8, 2004, making tomorrow's transit the second in this transit cycle. The next Venus Transit won't be until 2117. Those numbers alone are important, but as noted in recent Scientific American coverage of the coming transit, this year's transit will be one of a small handful of transits that have been recorded: "Only six transits have been observed in history: in 1639; 1761 and 1769; 1874 and 1882; and 2004."

Beyond the fact that you may only get one or two chances to see a Venus Transit in your lifetime, the coming transit is a big deal for astronomers. Historically, transits helped astronomers gauge the size of our solar system. "Until the 20th century it was the only way to determine the distance from Earth to the Sun," reports Jay Pasachoff. As Summer Ash explains in a post on Scientific American's Budding Scientist blog, astronomers used the principles of parallax to determine the distance of the Sun from the earth. Using measurements from two viewers at different locations, the distance from the sun can be triangulated. With that measurement in hand, the "distances to all the other planets known at the time could be derived." Based on calculations made during the Venus Transit of 1882, Ash notes, astronomers concluded that the Sun is 93 million miles away.

A Model for Exoplanet Research

According to Daly, transits continue to offer astronomers useful information, particularly because transits can reveal exoplanets. "Transiting is one of the major ways that astronomers detect extrasolar planets," says Daly. "NASA's Kepler mission, for example, has identified over 2300 exoplanet candidates (with 61 confirmed exoplanets) using transit techniques."

The Venus Transit, he explains, offers the general viewer a better understanding of how transits work, which in turn helps explain how astronomers are able to use transits to detect exoplanets near other stars. Those watching the Venus Transit will see a decrease in light from the Sun as Venus crosses in front of it. In the same way, astronomers observe and track the light from other stars. "Decreases in the amount of light detected from a star indicate that something is blocking that light, and if those decreases are periodic, it suggests the object doing the blocking is orbiting the star—a planet," says Daly. "Of course, detecting extrasolar planets is more complicated than that," he adds. But "this transit is a fantastic opportunity to conceptually understand 'transit timing,' an important method of exoplanet detection, the method used by NASA's Kepler spacecraft."

Venus Transit as a Benchmark

In addition to helping demystify the search for—and discovery of—exoplanets, Daly notes that the transit offers additional information about Venus, including more data regarding the composition of Venus' atmosphere. "While we have other ways to study Venus' atmosphere, transits are one of the very few sources of information about the composition of exoplanet atmospheres," explains Daly. "The Venus Transit is a chance for scientists to test their methods for using the light from exoplanet transits to understand the atmosphere of the transiting planet." In other words, studying Venus' atmosphere via the Venus Transit—and comparing that information to other known data—helps astronomers corroborate the approach of drawing conclusions about an exoplanet's atmosphere based on its transit.

Making Connections

Students and families who will be observing the Venus Transit can learn more about how the transit helped astronomers understand our solar system by learning more about how parallax works. The "A Puzzling Parallax" project is an introductory project that can help families better understand the relationship between distance and viewing perspective. For an immediate example, close one eye and hold a pencil out in front of you, lining it up with an option in the distance (a light switch, a tree, etc.). Now switch eyes. This distant object is no longer lined up with the pencil; it will appear to have shifted . This shift based on the difference in viewing perspective is central to parallax. Using hula hoops and a ruler, you and your family can explore further! For a more advanced study of parallax, see "Similar Triangles: Using Parallax to Measure Distance." (The project is more difficult, but the introductory material may be perfect for better understanding the concept of parallax and talking about it with your students.)

In addition to studying parallax, building a pinhole viewer gives you and your family a chance to build a simple scientific apparatus. The following Projects Ideas and resources can springboard some fun exploration of pinhole cameras:

• Digital Pinhole Camera
• Point, Click, Shoot! Photography with a Pinhole Camera
• Pinholes, Light and Aperture Size
• Form and Function: A LEGO Camera

Sources Referenced Above for Additional Reading:

• Venus Transit: Last Chance of the Century (Science Buddies Blog)
• Safely Viewing the Upcoming Transit (Sky & Telescope)
• Venus transit may boost hunt for other worlds
• The Transit of Venus: Viewing Tips from an Astronomer
• Crossing the Sun: The Last Transit of Venus until 2117
• How to View an Eclipse
• Make a Pinhole Projector for Eclipse Viewing

Note: A safe viewing method is required for watching the transit. Do not look directly at the Sun.

Our Summer Science Fellows recently turned the camera on themselves and had a great time shooting videos related to two of our Project Ideas. Here's a recap from Maddy:

"In July, the six Science Buddies Summer Fellows met and discussed ways that social media could be used to connect more students, teachers, and families to Science Buddies resources. After considering the various ways individuals use online media, we agreed that a fun and engaging approach to getting the audience interested in, and excited about, Science Buddies Project Ideas would be to create YouTube videos demonstrating cool Project Ideas ourselves.

We hope these videos will become a series of YouTube vignettes. For our first two installations, we decided to demonstrate the following projects:

Forensic Science: Building Your Own Tool for Identifying DNA: a clever Do-it-Yourself biotechnology project
Getting a Bang Out of Breath Spray: Studying the Chemistry and Physics of a Small Explosion: an explosive physics and chemistry project

The videos, posted on the Science Buddies YouTube channel, reflect the diverse personalities, interests, and talents of the Summer Fellows, and we hope that they highlight and spread our enthusiasm for Science Buddies and science education."

It looks like the Summer Science Fellows had a great time, and we hope you enjoy the videos! We're looking forward to seeing more! The two projects demonstrated in their first two videos can be found here:

• Getting a Bang Out of Breath Spray: Studying the Chemistry and Physics of a Small Explosion

• Forensic Science: Building Your Own Tool for Identifying DNA
  

A classic Magic School Bus episode involves making a bridge out of materials found in the bathroom in order to cross the bathtub, in which an alligator is lurking. To complicate matters, Ms. Frizzle's class has been shrunk! At two inches tall, the span of the bathtub seems about the size of the Grand Canyon!

Making Connections

Connected building blocks stacked vertically make a tower. But the same connected stack stretched side to side between two elevated objects creates a bridge.... and brings up bridge-related problems, like sagging! Shorten the distance of the bridge, and you may minimize the sagging. But if you need to span a bigger area, what can you do?

Tinkering with concepts of bridge design and principles of structural engineering is something students can explore alone or in teams, and summer is a great time to gather household supplies, and see what works. Bridge building offers a creative activity, a brain teaser, and an engineering project all wrapped up in one. Make it a challenge! Which kind of bridge is strongest? How can you test bridge strength? How can various kinds of bridges be reinforced to increase their strength? Which type of bridge holds up best in an earthquake? How wide can the bridge be before and remain strong?

In Action

For hands-on fun with bridges and an introduction to structural design, check out the following Science Buddies science fair project ideas:

• The Effect of Bridge Design on Weight Bearing Capacity
• Bridges That Can Take a Shake!
• Keeping You in Suspens(ion)
• The Design Process: Creating a Stronger Truss
• Fallen Arches: The Surprising Strength of Eggshells
• Paper Bridge for Pennies*
• The steps of the Engineering Design Process can help you think about how to approach designing a bridge for a specific use. Put your ideas on paper and get started!
• For a video look at bridges, watch DragonFly TV's "Bridge Building Club", which follows a middle-school team's efforts at designing and testing a balsa wood bridge.