2021-22 Homeschooling Projects

The red panda belongs in the kingdom animalia, the phylum chordata, the class mammalia, the order carnivora, the family ailuridae, and the species A. fulgens. This was not always so conclusive. It was named a panda in 1821 by the western scientific community because it eats bamboo and has a pseudo-thumb just like pandas. But it has a long tail that was banded like a lemur’s, as well as a waddling gait that bears lack. That's why in 1825 the red panda was classified as a part of the racoon family because of their odd traits and medium size. Then with the invention of DNA sequencing they were lumped in with bears again. With more extensive research, red pandas were declared part of the weasel superfamily musteloidea. The red panda was too distinct for any existing family, so the red panda had to go into a new family. They chose to call it ailuridae . Currently there are only two known species of red panda: Ailurus fulgens fulgens and Ailurus fulgens styani (also known as Ailurus ful...

The assignment was to graph and analyze kinetic energy, mass, and speed. Using phet.colorado.edu's Energy Skate Park simulator and Desmos.com to graph the results, we changed several variables and evaluated the results. When mass changed but height stayed the same, the speed didn't change. This was a linear relationship. However, when mass stayed the same but we changed height (and therefore the slope), speed changed. This changed was a curve (we did not generate enough data points to see whether the pattern was exponential).   KE = .5 x m x v^2 says that the kinetic energy of an object is directly proportional to the square of its speed. So if the speed increases by 2, the kinetic energy will increase by 4.

  For science we made four different solar ovens -- two reflective bowls and two pizza box solar ovens. The two variations of the reflective bowls were a metal bowl, and a plastic bowl with tinfoil lining the inside. The box ovens weren't very different from each other. When we set them up at 11:30 the temperature was 34°F outside. At 12:10 the marshmallow in the dominoes box was 49°, the metal bowl was 45°, the plastic bowl was 40°, and the brown box was 75°. At 1:00 the dominoes box was 47° and its paper was 60°, the metal bowl's marshmallow was 37° and the tinfoil was -5°, the plastic bowl's marshmallow was 33° and the bowl was -11°, and the marshmallow in the brown box was 56° and its paper was a whopping 80°. If we did this in summer this would work better because in winter we don't get as much sunlight, and the air is too cold for the insulation in the pizza boxes to work meaningfully, so for the heat doesn't build up enough to heat the marshmallows. The air c...

We had a tinker crate sent to us by Kiwico from our subscription that had us set up a LED light. There was a bonus activity of hooking up some wires to the LEDs, letting us touch the wires to materials and see if the materials are conductive (more on that later). Materials that made the LEDs work (and therefore were conductive) were tap water, graphite, metals, and coins. Things that were not conductive are wood, paper, plastic, filtered water, human skin, hair, glass, and baking soda. The things that light up the LEDs are conductive, meaning it lets positively and negatively charged electrons flow through easily.

The idea behind our first conservation of mass experiment was if we boil water until it was steam it would weigh the same because it was just changing form, not gaining or losing any mass. We put an eighth of a cup of water in the jar before, and  after boiling, a teaspoon turned to steam. The jar with water was  282g before boiling, 281g after some is converted to steam (a little might have escaped the lid), and 280g after opening the lid to let steam escape. This went just as I expected because I knew conservation of mass is a fundamental law of physics. We also conducted another experiment using ice to test conservation of mass over a phase change from solid to liquid. We put three ice cubes in a jar, weighed it, and then let it sit for a few hours. The ice cubes weighed 12 3/8 ounces. When the water melted, we weighed it again and its weight was the same. This was proof that the theory of conservation of mass is true.

We have set up two composting methods. The first one is worm composting. It is exactly what it sounds like. You order worms online and fill a bin with vegetables and newspaper and then wait. The worms will eat the newspaper and vegetables to make dirt. The other type of composting is just throwing organic waste into a pile and then waiting about a year. Microbes will break things down instead of worms. The worms are a much faster way to compost. Overall this is a fun project to keep worms and compare their composting to the compost pile. I would recommend the worms because they are faster but they do need food every week or so. The worms take slightly more work to keep going and you should be careful of what you throw in there, but composting is a good, beneficial hobby, especially if you own a garden.

  WATER POLLUTION Water is vital to our survival. It covers about 70% of the surface of the earth, but only 2.5% of that is fresh and 1% of that is available for use. The truth is, we are hurting our environment by polluting our water sources and as a result, killing fish, turtles, and other marine critters. The EPA states that “46% of US streams, 21% of lakes, 18% of coastal waters, and 32% of the nation’s wetlands are contaminated by pollution.” 1 Causes Things that can cause pollution include sewage, toxic waste, oil spills, heavy metal bioaccumulation, plastic, and even invasive species, algal blooms, and ocean acidification. One of the main pollutants is untreated sewage. Untreated sewage is waste like feces, urine, and pharmaceutical products in water. It is estimated that 80% of the world's sewage is untreated. This kills 2.2 million people annually worldwide from diarrheal diseases. 2 Toxic industrial chemicals hurt the environment as well. These include heavy metals like l...

  How to Mitigate the Impact of Human Population Growth Our increasing population requires more resources to sustain, and our ways of collecting those resources are harmful to the environment. We consume those resources inefficiently and our waste products damage ecosystems. Some people say this catastrophic damage is inevitable, but we can mitigate the impact of human population growth with our activities and technologies.  We can use clean/green energy generation (wind turbines, nuclear fission, hydroelectric dams, solar arrays) to reduce carbon pollution from more harmful energy generation technologies. These would replace the three harmful power generation technologies, oil, coal, and gas power plants, which get their resources through drilling, mining, and fracking respectively. Wind turbines Wind turbines vary in cost because of the many types. The turbines generate power by having the wind spin their blades which spin magnets and generate an electric current. The main o...

We did a project on water quality in our area and we tested four different water sources: the Concord River, Great Brook Farms pond, tap water, and filtered tap water. Concord River water comes from the Assabet and Sudbury rivers, which both have sources near Westborough, then flows into the Merrimack River and from there to the Atlantic ocean. Great Brook Farms pond water may come from a spring because there are no pipes or creeks going into it. We bought test strips at the hardware store for $48. The test strips were some of the worst test strips I have ever used. The answers were hard to get because they had very strict instructions -- each test had different instructions for temperature, amount of water, whether to shake the strip or not, how long to wait, how long to dip, whether to wiggle it in the water or not. The strips were hard to read with only a small part changing color. Some didn't change color, but was this because of a malfunction or because there was no contaminan...