Marshmallow Toss!

Day #2 in Summa Science. School has just started and we are already having fun. So many marshmallows, so many ways to toss them! The constraints were 1. Build a lever and then identify what type of lever was used to toss your marshmallow 2. Toss your marshmallow 1.5 meters into a bucket using the machine that you designed and built. 3. The machine had to be built and disassembled in the same class period. 4. Each student was required to draw their final design and include measurements. 5. Students will be documenting their design process. A fun time was had by all! That's engineering! Tomorrow students will look at the effect of moving a fulcrum on a lever arm and how moving it affects how far a marshmallow is thrown. That is inquiry!

Wind Energy

All

along my summer trip through the West I saw wind turbines. Of course, I was expecting them in the Columbia River Gorge, but they were in fact much more prominent in the gorge than they were the last time I drove through it a few years ago. Here the turbines are somewhat removed from human scale, as they are perched high above Interstate-84 where they stand out against the barren basaltic cliffs. Occasionally the turbines are closer, giving them a more human scale. These things are enormous. I knew that the gorge was a hotspot for turbines because of the wind that often blows there, but as I was to learn as I traveled to other states, they are found elsewhere in even greater numbers.

Who knew that Minnesota and Iowa would be where turbines rise out of corn fields? They can be right next to a farm house, a barn, a town. The scale is enormous. At times I imagined that they were tripods from the books by Samuel Youd (by the way if you have not read this sci-fi trilogy, I highly recommend that you do). The appearance of the landscape to me was unearthly. People here live among these giants, drive their tractors next to them. Cows munch grass near them, horses seek shade beneath them.

The next hotspot for turbines was in Colorado and Wyoming. In fact, Wyoming is quite an energy state. There were large numbers of wind turbines on ridges and along the highway, clustered together in the most remote locations. How do they assemble these out here? How do they transport them to distant hills? One blade alone needs a double long trailer to haul it. Elsewhere in Wyoming were natural gas plants. This state seemed the least populated of any that I traveled through, yet it is indeed energy rich. How is this energy transported to population centers? So many questions. I definitely need to learn more.