Agonotheta

Poor Zach

April 29, 2004

Yesterday I judged a 4th Grade Science Fair. For some, this would not be a fun task. But for me, it was a blast!

The best one to me was Leslie's. She wanted to test the effect of music on the memory. So she had volunteers read lyrics to a song and after, write down as many lyrics as they could remember. Then she had another group of test subjects read the same lyrics while listening to the song and then write down as many as they could. One of the funniest things about her project was the two songs she used to test her subjects. The first was "Cats in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin, the other was "Rocky Mountain High" by John Denver. I asked her why she chose those two songs and she said they were old enough that her subjects wouldn't already know the lyrics.

My favorite, though, was Gardner's project. He had noticed sometime in the ten years he's been alive that water balloon's seem to "explode" better on it's target when they have a small hole puncturing the balloon. So, he took ten water balloon's with holes in them and ten water balloon's without holes in them and threw them to find the percentage of properly exploding balloons. It seems about 50% of the balloons exploded without a hole, whereas 90% exploded with the hole. The best part of his experiment was that he chose his brother Zach, who apparently "volunteered", to be the target.

Who says our students are getting dumber? I don't get to interact with students too often, but I was very impressed with all of the students and their projects.