What is it like working in your museum?
The Bradbury Science Museum is a very fun place to work. There are interesting people to work with, and we spend a lot of our time teaching each other interesting things. The museum is full of fascinating objects and information, and visitors come here from all over the world. The museum is part of one of the top science laboratories in the world, and we get to hear about amazing things the scientists are doing here.
We teachers do research, schedule visits, give presentations, and plan future activities and projects. Sometimes we have to catch up on our paperwork. We stay pretty busy. Several times each week, when we are lucky, we even get to go out of the museum in the Science On Wheels van to visit students in their classrooms as we did at your school!
Do you enjoy working with science activities with kids?
There are two of us who are "museum educators." We started out as teachers, and we love working with kids. We also all agree that science is not only very important to learn about, but that it is really cool stuff. We try hard to make our programs as fun and as interesting as we can, and it is all for you students. The big payoff in a job like this is when we get to actually see kids learning from and enjoying what we do.
After a demonstration comparing falling paper and falling books during which we placed the paper on top of the book.
I just got your question asking what would happen if the paper was not entirely on top of the book when we dropped them.
This is a great question, and I am happy to say that I don't know.
Now that you have identified the problem, I suggest you design some experiments, write some hypotheses, follow your procedures, record your observations, and report your results. I would like to see what you discover.
Other questions: Does it matter how big the book is compared to the paper? Does it matter how heavy the book is? Would it work with tissue paper? What happens if you use cardboard in place of either the paper or the book, or both? Would it work if you crumpled up the paper? I don't remember if we tried putting the paper below the book in your class. What if you hold the paper a little bit above the book when you drop them?
One of the best things about science is that the more we find out, the more there is to wonder about.
