Friday, March 28, 2014
By EMMALEE C. TORISK
STRUTHERS
As a kid, Tyler Fox was really, really scared of thunderstorms.
His uncle gave him this advice: Whenever you’re scared of something, learn about it.
On Thursday morning, Fox — now an outreach educator for COSI, or the Columbus-based Center of Science and Industry — shared that advice with more than 300 kindergartners and first-graders gathered in the gymnasium of Struthers Elementary School.
Thursday was the first of two days that COSI on Wheels was visiting the school for both an interactive assembly and a number of hands-on activities about weather.
“I’m going to tell you guys everything I know about thunderstorms,” Fox said. For the next 45 minutes, Fox introduced students to many of the concepts behind common weather events, beginning with the idea of molecules, which he described as “really, really tiny” but affecting “everything in the weather.”
To demonstrate how molecules behave — they behave much like humans do, he said — Fox recruited six student volunteers to act as molecules. When molecules are cold, they “like to snuggle”; conversely, when they’re hot, they “spread out” and they “like to move really fast.”
“Being a molecule’s a lot of work, isn’t it?” Fox asked the student volunteers after they’d run back and forth across the gym, alternating between “hot” and “cold.”
Fox also explained the concept of air pressure by showing how a pop can — and later, a barrel — could crush in on itself after the water inside of it had been heated to a boil, then rapidly placed into cold water. The molecules in the can were really “warm and spread out,” Fox said, but contracted and slowed down when cooled, resulting in less pressure on the inside of the can. The stronger air pressure on the outside pushed in the can.
Next, Fox shared the three ingredients to make a cloud — dust, water vapor and low temperatures — and even created a cloud (with the help of some liquid nitrogen). Students also learned about types of clouds: altocumulus, the pretty, poofy ones that “look like cottonballs”; cumulonimbus, the “big, mean, scary thunderstorm clouds”; stratus, the ones that “come in layers”; and cirrus, the “real high, light, wispy clouds.”
Fox ended the assembly with an activity students had been waiting for: the chance to make a thunderstorm in their gym. While Fox manned what he called “a super-secret COSI lightning machine,” sections of students replicated the sounds of wind, rain and molecules spreading apart and coming together to make thunder.
“Kids learn best when they get a hands-on experience,” Fox said.
Hannah Rusu, 7, a first-grader at Struthers, called the assembly “cool.”
She especially liked when Fox “was doing the big, giant thunderbolts” and said it was interesting to hear about molecules and their impact on the weather.
“I like that you learn about things you never knew,” Hannah said. “It’s fun to learn about science.”
Fellow first-grader Ariel Jackson, also 7, added that she simply enjoyed the assembly because she “never had science before” — and because “it’s fun.”
Exposing students to science was one of Principal Maggie Kowach’s reasons for bringing COSI to Struthers Elementary. She arranged the events as part of the district’s attempts to infuse STEM — or science, technology, engineering and math — into all classrooms at all levels of education.
“We know how important it is for 21st-century learning skills, and we want them at an early age to love science,” Kowach said.