Kaylee's Science Fair Project for Kindergarten was to test several bubble recipes and find the best one. To get right to it, the best recipe for GIANT bubbles that you can catch and even stick your hand in: Best Recipe: · 6 Cups of Water · 1/2 Cup of concentrated Dawn Dishsoap · 1 Tblsp of Glycerin (Amazon, Whole Foods, Craft Stores) That's it. Super Easy. We tried some other ingredients such as baking powder and corn starch, but neither seemed to improve on this simple recipe. Warning: Do NOT use un-concentrated dish soap as it simply does not work nearly as well. Even with barely any water added and lots of soap, we could never get the strong and giant bubbles we got with concentrated. Bubble Wands: We tried some wands from store-bought bubbles. They worked OK for small bubbles, but our bubble solution did not perform noticeably better than the store bubbles with these wands. We made homemade wands that we saw on this blog post (towards the bottom). To create the wands, we took two straws (ours were bendy straws, so we cut the bendy part off). Then we took a string and fed it through both straws then tied the string together at the ends. We tried various lengths of string, something at close to shoulder length seemed a good length. Getting the Most Fun Out of These Bubbles: These are not the sort of bubbles you are used to. It took us a lot of practice and playing around to find out how to make the most out of them. My older daughter discovered she could hold the bubbles in her hands if they were covered in the frothy bubbles from the bubble solution. My youngest daughter discovered you could use a normal bubble wand and blow bubbles directly onto soapy hands. And my son blew his own mind when he stuck most of his bubbly hand INSIDE of a bubble. Below are a few tips for getting the best bubbles: · Leave the string slack when dipping in the bubble solution, take the wand out of he solution, slowly pull the handles apart making the string taut before blowing the bubbles · Hold the taut wand at your hips, pull up to your chest at a medium pace and walk backwards. Leave the handles open to make a bubble snake. Push the handles closed to cut the snake into floating bubbles. · Cover hands in the frothy bubbles from the bubble solution to catch and poke inside of bubbles · Use soft gloves to catch and bounce bubbles
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We will write a full review this weekend, but the bottom line: JACK GOT TO MEET ADAM SAVAGE!!! He's been a fan since he was 3.5 (literally) and it has been his dream for several years to meet him and tonight he did. Both he and Michael Stevens are absolutely the real deal. We only had a few seconds with them but you could feel their warmth in those seconds. They are two dudes who are loving what they are doing and are loving sharing it with their fans. This year I did another Little Bits Showcase for my science fair. I wanted to do a more interesting build than the robot from last year. My dad and I came up with the idea for a "Candy Surprise" machine.. Whenever a kid tried to take a piece of candy from the bowl, the motion sensor would trigger a light, a servo with a sign attached to it saying "busted", a buzzer, and it would also count up the number of times people were busted on the number bit. We also challenged visitors by giving them a form with a bunch of different types of bits listed. They had to check off the bits they thought were used in our build. It was a fund build and even more fun watching everyone have fun trying to sneak the candy. We will provide build details in an update to this post. Welcome to the first in our series of Chain Reaction (Rube Goldberg) Machines. We wanted to start off simple with only a three step machine. We used a sound trigger to kick off a servo motor with a stick on it to start the dominoes (Step 1). The last domino had a shoe string attached to it and fell off the table, which pulled a stopper holding back a marble (Step 2). Then the marble rolled down a ramp to force a wire to connect to a power bit, which powered another servo motor attached to the ending flag (Step 3). The ramp is a toilet paper roll cut in half. We cut 2 small slits in the roll to wedge another small piece of TP roll into for the stopper. Click the pictures below for detailed pictures of each step. Post by Dad For Jack's first grade science fair project, he decided he wanted to spend his time teaching kids in his school about Little Bits. He put together a Little Bits Showcase to show kids what Little Bits are and what they can do. It was a hands on display allowing kids to actually interact with the Little Bits.
To show off some of the things that can be done with Little Bits, we built a Little Bits robot and a Little Bits timer. The robot had arms that moved up and down (servos) as well as a mouth that lit up (bar graph bit) controlled by a button. The timer used a timer bit that controlled a servo. The servo had a stick and a flag that said "Time's Up!" Press the button and the Time's Up flag would go down, after 2 minutes, the flag would pop up saying time is up. We built this motorized box to hold Jack's valentines for valentines day. We decided the morning of Jack's valentine's day party to add the little bits to the box. It was a crazy mad dash to get it done, Jack even missed the bus! But, we got it to work and everyone wanted to try out the box. The box worked by pressing the button which would open/close the lid depending on how long you held the button down. We used the servo on swing mode so it would go as long as the button was held down. The Build: The servo was connected to a spoon which was connected to a pipe cleaner which was connected to the flap on the box.
Things We Learned:
Post by Jack Today's builds are two machines for my Jump Rope for Heart Campaign. Every year my school does a fund raiser to raise money to help people with bad hearts. If you would like to donate to my campaign, please click this link: Jack's Jump Rope for Heart Kaylee and I each did a build with help from our dad. Kaylee's is a jump rope with a static heart. Mine has a jump rope and a jumping heart. Kaylee's Machine
This build was pretty simple. We used a pipe cleaner for the jump rope as the DC motor doesn't spin fast enough to use a piece of string. Jack's Machine
Little Bits:
This build was tricky. We wanted to have a heart jumping, but we had to figure out some way for it to be inside the rope, otherwise the rope would catch on wires powering the jumping heart. We figured out we could build a "jumper" that would dangle from the axle powering the jump rope. The jump rope itself was pretty easy, just two tall towers to hold the axle, and a couple of gears to attach the pipe cleaners to then hook up the DC motor and off it goes. The jumper was a real pain in the butt though. It uses a lego adapter, battery bit, an LED (needed for length), and a servo. We had to build a little shelf on the jumper to hold the battery. It took a LONG time to get the jumper just right. It was a lot of trial and error, the thing would fall apart constantly. We tried at least 4 or 5 designs before finally settling on this one. Key Lessons Learned from this build:
Our goal with this build was to use little bits to make a lego robot's arm move. The build is very simple, but it was fun actually making Legos move. More Information Coming Later...
Post by Kaylee I got two Lego sets for Christmas. I got a doggie house with a little doggie and those little bones. I built it by myself!
I also got a girl in a car with a surfboard, another little brown doggie, and ICE CREAM! This was our first real build of something powered by little bits.
Materials Used:
The build took roughly 45 minutes. Building the structure was relatively simple. The motorized part was tricky and took a lot of trial and error. Key Lessons Learned from this build: 1) We should have made sure the post (the big cardboard tube) was more stable before adding the motorization. It kept tilting and we had to keep adjusting it. 2) We learned how to have the motor separate from the turning gear by using rubber bands and wheels instead of having the motor inline with the gear. 3) Having a large bag of various sized rubber bands was critical, as we needed to find the right thickness and tension between the wheels. 4) We used rubber bands to keep the motor attached to the lego bit. Then we had to use larger lego bricks for more connection points to stop the motor from popping off. |
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