STEAM with Dad

The idea for today's project came from making a competition in my class to see who could design a building that can survive an earthquake. I saw this same idea in Lego Masters and it looked fun. Unfortunately, we didn't get to do it because we ran out of time before the school year finished, but I learnt a lot in the process. This project is about an earthquake machine that I built with Lego and Micro:bit. It features 4 different speeds to make increasingly harder to survive and also resembles a bit what would happen in a real earthquake as the P, S and surface waves arrive. Here is what the full thing looks like so let's delve into more detail. As you can see here, when you pay close attention we have reused the Minecraft salvation console because it also used a 9 volt pump so all I had to do was switch it out for my 9 volt Lego motor and it was good to go. In this image below you can see the motor shield that I used to drive the 9 volt motor for this project. It is the ...

As I promised last blog post, I will be showing you how to make a 3 axis accelerometer. Three axis are better than one because it makes it easier to distinguish when the P and S waves arrive which helps measure the epicenter.   Here's what you will need: a Micro:bit, a USB cable, and a computer. The code in the image below is reading the acceleration for the x, y and z axis and redirecting the readings to the USB so that it can be graphed. You might have noticed  the "+1023" to the value of the 'z' axis. If we don't do this, it will always be reading "-1023" due to the force of gravity. In this video I will show you the seismometer in action. I decided to test it in school to see if, when all the kids in my class jumped at the same time we could cause an earthquake. Even though all twenty eight kids jumped at once, the earthquake was very minor and barely noticeable on the diagram. Due to the lack of seismic activity in Australia I have decided not t...

So, moving on to earthquakes, this maps shows Australia’s past earthquake activity. As you can see in Queensland there is very little seismic activity compared to areas like  and Victoria New South Wales. But in general we have very little compared to other countries, like Japan or New Zealand as these sit on the ring of fire. How do we know where earthquakes ocur apart from seeing the damage like in this photo? In case you did not notice the rails were originaly straight. The simple answer to that is seismic stations. In this photo you can see all the seismic stations in Australia. As you can see, they all have two or three letter acronyms. Now let's take a peek inside of a seismic station to see what it looks like. In the image below you can see it is nothing too fancy, just a sensor, a solar panel for power and the data recording and transmiting equipment. In the next post I will show you how to build a D.I.Y one at home for only 300 billion dollars ... just joking only twenty f...

Hey guys today I am going to tell you about plate tectonics and volcanoes. The idea to learn more about this came because at school we covered the topic of natural disasters. The most important thing you need to know about tectonic plates is how they move; the magma that is in contact with the core heats up causing it to be less dense and rise and then it cools down and goes back down. Think of it like a conveyor belt. This phenomenon is called convection. Now let's move on to volcanoes. A volcano is essentially an opening, or vent, in the Earth's crust through which magma, seeps out to the surface which makes a mountain as the magma solidifies. The type of volcano I will talk about today is called a subdutcion volcano which is basically when one plate slips under another turning into magma causing pressure to acumulate and magma to seep through the cracks. But happens when the magma can just seep throughthe cracks well then pressure builds up and up and up until it all blows u...

My inspiration for this blog post came when I went to my local planetarium and one of the staff showed me the planetarium telescope and projected the sun on to a blank piece of paper and he showed me the sun spots. So I thought I could do the same thing with my telescope. But what are sunspots anyway? They are   temporary, dark areas on the Sun's visible surface that are cooler than its surroundings due to intense magnetic fields inhibiting the flow of heat from the Sun's interior. But let me tell you, observing them has its challenges:   WARNING: NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR TELESCOPE!!! The first challenge, since you can not look at the sun directly is, correctly orienting it to point at the sun. The solution I have thought of to solve this problem is when your telescope is pointing at the sun is that you should only see the circumference of the front part of the telescope on the wall like in this picture. . My second tip, since you can not look at the sun directly i...

Today I am sharing a video of a robot that uses AI to sort rubbish to improve recycling. This is a robot I have done as part of a bigger project for a coding competition in my country. The robot can only identify cans and plastic bottles. I found that training the model to detect other types of waste would be easy. The hard part is the mechanical components. I can rotate a servo both ways but manipulating more than two types of waste would require a conveyor belt and more complex mechanisms. The project was about recycling. The rest of the project included a website with HTML and CSS, a Scracth application and an app for Android mobile phones. I hope you enjoy the video!

Hello today I present to you  a video I made for a science assessment from my school it is to inform kids about the states of matter. I hope it will help you or teach you something you didn't now. Without further a do I leave you with this video and  hope you like it.    Thanks for watching!!!

Today I am going to show you how I made an infinity mirror. You might be wondering, what is an infinity mirror? It is a device that tricks your eyes into believing you are looking at something very deep when in reality it isn't. The key is to have a narrow frame with a mirror at the back, a one way mirror at the front and some lights inside. What happens is that some of the light comes out through the partial mirror in every rebound, so you end up the same lights multiple times. As I write this, I am realizing that it is much easier to show it than to explain it. So, this is the end result. Materials and tools You are going to need the following: a frame with tall straight walls on the inside. Many frames are not like this, but this is necessary if you want to use an LED strip like me for cool effects LED strip cut-to-size mirror for the back cut-to-size glass or acrylic for the front one way mirror film. These are very cheap in Aliexpress Jumper (Dupont) cables like the ones you u...

Learning about lenses , refraction and optics in general has now enabled me to make my own telescope. I wanted to build one because I have always loved space and astronomy. Another day I must tell you about a hobby of mine, launching water rockets.  There are two main types of telescopes: refractors (made out of lenses) and reflectors (use mirrors too). Galileo Galilei made one of the first refractor telescopes and Isaac Newton made the first reflector. The one I built is a refractor, which is a bit cheaper to build.  How it works In this diagram you can see that the telescope has two lenses: The first is called the "objective". The function of the objective is to create an image with the light comes from the celestial body. The light rays come in parallel because the object is very far away. This means the image forms in the focal point. The image is inverted though. The second lens is called the "eyepiece" and it typically has a much smaller focal length. The eye...

Today I am going to tell you what lenses are, how they work and many more things. Let's dive in! A lens is an optical device with at least one curved surface to focus or disperse light beams by means of refraction.  Some of you may be wondering why I am talking about lenses. Well, it is because of how common they are, for example lenses are used in microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and even your Granma's reading glasses. So, now that you know what lenses are I can teach you how they work.  In the previous blog post we saw the light moving from air to water. The surface between the two media was flat but the surface of the lens is curved. We can use Snell's law if we think of a curve as  a big series of tiny flat lines one after the other.  For example in my diagram below I have drawn a plano-convex lens and three light rays. First, they go through the flat face of the lens. Snell's law predicts that they will go straight through because the sine of 0 degrees is 0 The...