STEAM with Dad

During science week I saw a conference from an astrophysicist showing us photos of stars. He told us what a reflector telescope is and how it uses a parabolic mirror. So I asked my dad about parabolas and he told me about the conic sections. Conic sections are different shapes you get by cutting a cone at different angles. I decided to see this by myself using Tinkercad. You can find other posts in the blog talking about Tinkercad if you are interested. It is very easy to use. These are all the sections I created When you cut a cone horizontally you get a circle. Here we have represented the circle in yellow. If you cut a little bit more inclined than horizontal you get an ellipse. Here you can see three different ellipses at different angles in red colour and how the first one compares with the circle. The more you incline the cut, the stretchier it gets. Ellipses are cool because that's the type of orbit planets do around the Sun If you keep inclining the cut eventually you reach...

The idea for this experiment came from learning about forces in school. I wanted to make an experiment to share my new knowledge with my class. This experiment is about seeing how much a spring will stretch if a certain amount of weight pulls from it. This is called Hooke's law, after the scientist that first proofed this concept, Robert Hooke. Procedure I attached a spring under a table with a hook at the end, so that I could hang different weights. I also fixed a ruler to the leg of the table to do the measurements Then I created different weights by putting water in a bottle for specific amounts of weight. For reference 100 ml of water is 100 grams. Next I hung the bottle and measured the amount of stretching on the spring from its original position I made note of the measurements in my notebook and then put them on a graph I discovered that the points formed a line. That's very interesting! That made me think, can I use this graph to predict what will happen if I hang any w...

What inspired me to make this project was my teacher's farm. She has 75 chickens and she complains that snakes are a problem and also getting up early in the morning to open the chicken coop. So I decided to make two robots to solve her problem. The first robot opens the chicken coop automatically at day time and closes at night time. The second robot goes around the farm and captures any snakes so that they can't have chicken for breakfast. Then it carries the snake out of the farm making sure it doesn't damage any of my teacher's precious eggs and chickens in the process. To solve it I had to learn new skills such as my blocks, basic line following algorithms and sensors I had never worked with before.   This is a video demonstrating the solution I made.

Have you ever tried growing crystals at home? If you visit the shops with your parents, I am sure you have seen crystal growing kits before, but there are also plenty of tutorials online so I decided to do at home because I knew I would learn more. You can make many different type of crystals with every day items, but I choose sugar because apart from looking nice they are edible. Every crystal starts with the same process, by making a saturated solution. A solution is when we dissolve something called the "solute" into a liquid called the "solvent". In my case, sugar is the solute and water is the solvent. At the beginning if we put some sugar in the water and stir it will disappear, but if we keep adding sugar, eventually it will not disappear. This point is what we call a saturated solution.  Normally, you would expect that the amount of solute you put in is less than the solvent. That is true for most things, but not for sugar. Surprisingly, you can put up to a ...

Originally, the main reason why I made Minecraft salvation was; unlike the other projects, due to a school exam. And in case you thought I was a PhD, I'm not, and yes, I go to school, hence, some of my projects originate with an exam or a test. The game story line is about a group of Minecraft mobs (living things that are not humans in Minecraft) which decided to destroy the Minecraft world and turn it into cardboard. The goal of the game is to kill the five mobs: Creeper, Stray, Skeleton, Warden and Ender dragon. Only then, will Minecraft world survive so that all the kids and adults in the world can play Minecraft again; actually, realistically not the adults.  At the beginning of the game you can choose your favourite launcher and ball. You are then given ten shots to shoot all the non moving targets:  Creeper, Stray, Skeleton and Warden and the moving target, the Ender dragon. If you don't manage to defeat them in ten shots or less you loose and Minecraft will be destroyed...

In this blog post I am going to show you a prototype of a security system I created some time ago. It involves 2 LEDs with resistors, a microservo and a Microbit V2 if you want to hear sounds. This is the code. As you can see the A and B buttons add A's and B's to a string variable called "keystroke". Then when you press A+B it compares "keystroke" with "password". As you can see the password is "ABA" but you can set it to whatever you want. I have recorded a video with the demo. Enjoy!

  Today I will be telling you about a mission called Europa a Clipper. Mission The main goal of the mission is to find whether there could be life under the surface of Europa. Mission will launch on October 2024 and arrive to Jupiter on 2030. The mission will end on 2034 after completing 20 flybys as close as 25 kilometres (2.5 times higher than a plane) to scan the entire moon. Spacecraft Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft ever developed by NASA. Since it has to travel so far, it has an array of solar panels which is 27 metres wide when deployed. All electronics are shielded in a titanium and aluminium vault to protect them from Jupiter's radiation. Destination Europa is one of the four moons discovered by Galileo. Europa is the second closest moon to Jupiter in between Io and Ganymede. Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system. Europa has the biggest ocean in the solar system and Ganymede is the biggest moon in the solar system. Joining the mission Yo...

This project is about building a device that measures how long you have been in the sun. This is very important in Australia because of the ozone layer. They always tell us in school to reapply sunscreen every 2 hours but I am using this project for a coding challenge. This project uses the onboard LEDs as a brightness sensor. The detects all kind of light, not only ultra-violet which is the real danger, but it still helps me prove the idea. A real product should use an UV sensor and be more compact. This is the code. It uses a variable to count how many seconds you have been under the sun. The Micro:bit warns you with a sound if it has gone over the time limit, so to run this code you will need a Micro:bit version 2. After testing the code in the sun and indoors I set the brightness limit to 250. When the reading is below 250 it will not count. Pressing button A shows you how long you have been in the sun. Once you reapply sunscreen you need to press button B to restart. The time limi...

In this blog post I made a step counter. I am planning to use this for a coding challenge in the place where I live. The purpose is to help people track how much moderate activity they do The solution uses a Micro:bit which is the same microcontroller for kids that I have used in other projects. This project uses the accelerometer to count your foot steps. The accelerometer is a type of sensor that detects movement. These are the movements you can detect with the accelerometer. My project uses "on shake" This is the code. I made a variable called "steps" that keeps track of how many steps have been detected. It gets increased by 2 every time it gets shaken because we have two legs. If button A is pressed it will set the "steps" to 0 and if you press button B it will show how many steps you have walked so far. In the following video you can how it works

In this blogpost I will tell you about a program I made so that anyone can practice times tables for free. In order to learn the times tables you need someone to ask you random questions but if your parents/carers are busy, this program will never say "I am busy". When you click the green flag the ghost glides on to stage and will ask you 20 random questions. It will tell you if your answer is correct. If you get it wrong it tells you the right answer. However, it doesn't keep track of how many questions you get right or wrong so that you don't get upset. The important thing is to practice often and not to let your mistakes make you sad. By default it will ask you 20 questions from all times tables between 2 and 9. If you have an account in Scratch you can modify it to suit your needs. The important code is in these 3 lines For example, what if want to get 30 questions and only practice the 7 times tables? You can change the code like this. You can access the program ...

Today I am sharing a game I have made in Scratch. It is called "Space Mission 1". You have to shoot asteroids and flying saucers. Asteroids give you 1 point and saucers give you 6 points.  Use "q" and "a" to move the spacecraft. Shoot with the "left" arrow You can access the game here https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/623206612 Enjoy!

Recently we got some borosilicate test tubes for chemistry projects. The problem with test tubes is that they have a round bottom and they cannot stand up. Instead of buying a stand for the test tubes we decided to design one and to print it in the 3D printer which is more fun. As you can see in the photo we some big and some small test tubes. We decided to make all holes big enough for the big ones to fit inside. I used calipers to measure the diameter of the large tubes We designed it with a height that allows us to easily pick both types of tubes from the top easily We added some rings to the bottom platform so that the tube didn't slip or fall down Before printing the whole thing we printed a small prototype of the holes with 2 different sizes because 3D prints can shrink a little when they cool down. This allowed us to discover that the size of the hole we had chosen wasn't big enough once it printed. So we could change the design before printing the full stand. For design...