Ack

Sometimes you almost want to cry for the wasted opportunities.

Today was Engineering Expo day for school-kids, and I was helping chaperone. It was too cold for the IceCube T-shirt, so I didn't do a lot of IceCube PR.

The first thing the 6 under our care were curious about was a talk called "Changing the Universe." I will omit the man's name. He was a relatively slow speaker, which was a bad sign, but introduced himself as having worked on the ISS from the inside, and also on the IceCube experiment, which were good signs.

He started by introducing Ptolemy's model using an old illustrated picture that nobody could read, said things about planets going backwards, and then introduced Copernicus using a similarly old drawing and mentioned Kepler's contribution. Then he started explaining the 1/R^2 rule by describing a candle inside a sphere.

By that time 3 of the 6 kids were nodding off. We bundled them out.

Even for adults the lecture would have been slow and unclear. For 5'th graders it was awful. I later explained why the 1/R^2 rule made sense, by talking to them about lawn sprinklers, and getting more or less wet the closer or farther you were from it.

You may ask if I could have done better.

Sure!

He was using Powerpoint. That supports animations.

OK, show what people observed in the night sky. Animate it. Start with the Sun and Moon, which are nice and simple. People figured out those patterns early on, and it is easy to illustrate those with easy animations of the Moon's position against the "fixed stars." Yes, that requires a bit of animation-fu, but it isn't rocket science. I'm fairly sure there is educational software that does that sort of thing already.

Then show the planets, and how they move against the "fixed stars." That's a little trickier to animate if you want to do it right, but I assume you want to do it right. A little patter to point up "What the heck are those lights in the sky doing?" doesn't have to take very long, and you get to start out with a simple puzzle to try to catch their interest.

Illustrate Ptolemy's model with a clear animated cartoon, not a thousand-year-old illumination. Then remind them of the weird epicycle clunkiness of the model, and show them Copernicus's animated cartoon. It isn't hard to show, with a couple of lines drawn on that cartoon, that a Sun-centered model doesn't need epicycles.

Then, instead of saying that the Milky Way is made of lots of stars, show it. Zoom.

Instead of starting with 1/R^2, start with the question--how far away are these stars--and then talk about how you start with the simplest assumption: the stars are the same brightness (not true, but you have to start somewhere), and then you need a relationship between apparent brightness and distance.

You introduce the 1/R^2 relationship by talking about things from their experience. Parallax you introduce with cartoon illustrations (I've seen plenty of these), instead of the eventual trig problem. If the kids know trig they'll figure the connection out themselves, and if they don't there's no point in it. A cartoon gets the idea across just fine.

That's where we left.

I figure working up the slides to get this far would take several weeks. There's a lot of stuff to get looking right, and PowerPoint presentations always take me forever even without animations.

But afterwards even 5'th graders could walk out understanding how and why our picture of the universe has changed. You'd even have time to point out the shock a non-Earth-centered description was to naive thinking about our position in the Universe.

... Deep breath ...

On the other hand, the kids seemed to enjoy some of the other demonstrations, and making catapults, and directing robots, and making vacuum-formed plastic, and so on. Yours truly thought that making marshmallow towers would be a terribly frustrating exercise, but since you get to eat your failures I suppose it has its attractions. There was even a Candy Crusher, in which a machine used to test the strength and resilience of materials was used on different varieties of candy. "This springs right back after being squeezed, while this never does quite recover..." The reactor wasn't open this time.