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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Range of Projects Displayed at Expo

By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
          East Mountain High School students have now tackled the big ideas of science and even created miniature replicas to illuminate them.
        Student dioramas and papers stood on display at the Fisher and Smith Memorial Gymnasium on Dec. 12. The displays showed the students' unique takes on concepts like atomic theory, biological evolution and heliocentric theory, or the idea that the sun is at the center of the universe.
        The Big Ideas in Science Expo is the culmination of a cross-disciplined approach to science, which the school's science teachers started this year.
        To explain the approach, Bradd Schulke — a science, martial arts and special education instructor at the school — said if science is incorporated with a subject a student likes, such as music or history, teachers might be able to get his or her attention. For example, during a section on the respiratory system he brought someone to teach his students CPR.
        As a result, the work at the expo was relatively diverse. Some students set up laptops to show the videos they made to explain the concepts and others created fictitious journals of long-lost relatives, supposedly discovered in an attic, that described some of the common ideas of a century past.
        Joseph Fattor, Shane Fulfer and Jacob Baca made a model of "Little Boy," the plutonium-based bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
        "I've just liked explosives my whole life," said Fulfer, when asked why he and the others chose this project specifically.
        It took two weeks, working every night, to put the project together, he said. Most of the research on the display board was done on the Internet, primarily Wikipedia.
        The mock-up of the bomb is six feet long, about half the length of the original. It was created using parts for a chimney and what was probably a propane tank. Fulfer said the tank was something he found on his grandfather's property.
        Fulfer's father welded the pieces together, but the students did the rest of the work, down to painting the bomb green.
        They said the weren't sure of the color of the original, but would have preferred army green to the color they ended up painting the notorious bomb, which is closer to forest green.