Final Meeting Preview: Thermite!!!

Tomorrow, as many of you may realize, is a special day. It's senior send-off. It's our (seniors') last day of classes. (So sad...) And last but not least, it is the final meeting of the 2007-2008 season of the science club.

If you go to one meeting all year, I'd recommend you go to this one. We are very pleased to say that we have procured a bit of thermite for fiery fun. We basically have no clue what we're doing, but that's what adult supervision is for. :) Thermite burns at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here's a video of some experts playing with thermite. And here's a few kids who have hardly any clue what they're doing.

ADDITIONALLY, and even more important in the long term, we're voting for next year's leaders of the science club. (If you want to be on the ballot but haven't talked to me, please reply ASAP.)

By the way, re: the thermite--it'll melt basically ANYTHING, so if anyone has any ideas, bring something in. We're also looking for someone to bring in an old cast-iron pot or pan that will not be returned (aside from maybe as a glob of melty metal) or some dry sand. Let me know.

I hope to see you all there! It's shaping up to be a great final meeing!

DIY: How To Shoot Fireballs

Make a Fireball Shooter! - video powered by Metacafe

DIY: How To Shoot Fireballs

Sixth Meeting: Glorious Eggs, Philosophy

EDIT: Hey look, we were featured on the Beaver web site, with pictures and everything!

Friday's meeting was, in a word, glorious. We started out by just taping two rocket engines to an egg facing opposite directions--it spun and whirred and when the smoke cleared the egg was just plain old gone. And then we launched Vivek's group's 2-stage egg rocket, which sort of hovered in the air for a moment before dropping to the ground. And when the first engine ignited the second, the first got shot out the back and off it went. It actually caught on fire, and it was burning quite nicely before Ms. Nickerson cruelly put it out. Too bad. The warmth was much appreciated while it lasted. And for the final one, we tried igniting three engines at once. And, well, two of them went!


Video: BSEC: Sixth Meeting (Third Year)

Ineconomies of Scale

Unfortunately, our attendance dropped to the lowest it's been all year on Friday. It's too bad, since it was such an entertaining meeting. But we inevitably reach this point every year--the point where seemingly overnight, half the club disappears. We're completely to blame, of course. We've never been even remotely organized, and there's just not enough stuff for 40 people to do every meeting.

But today's meeting only confirmed what many club members have known for a long time: with very few people, we can be very productive.

So we've been thinking. What if we had "do" meetings and "view" meetings? I feel bad that all members are obliged to go to all meetings, even the ones where nothing happens. So what if a core group prepared things for everyone else to watch at perscribed times? It would be even better if we could get everyone actively involved, of course--for instance, by splitting into subclubs with different foci, like model rocketry or potato guns or robotics. But we're not sure we can pull that off. Everything is completely undecided right now--let us know what you think in the comments.

(Note also that even if we don't announce when we'll be shooting off the rockets, there's a simple formula: come late. But not too late, of course. I'd say 12:20 is when things typically get going. Although actually, today we were shockingly speedy getting the first rocket egg launched....)

Second Meeting: Nocka Rockets

Our dear onetime member Andrew Nocka may have left us for the UK, but his spirit lives on in the noble tradition of Nocka Rockets. Today we fired a few off, including a sort of corkscrew one and one with wings. Plus we ate cake. :)


Video: BSEC: Second Meeting (Third Year)

First Meeting: Dry Ice and Potato Gun

We held our first meeting of this year on October 5, and I think it went pretty well. We played with dry ice and the potato gun. I've posted a video recap below.

One thing that we're aware of is that there was quite a bit of waiting, and we didn't have a chance for everyone in the club to really get involved. That's a hard thing to do with forty people, which is why we may experiment with breaking into multiple groups at our next meeting.

If anyone has any other comments, feel free to email Peter, Vivek, or me, or leave a comment on this post.

I know I had a lot of fun, and we look forward to seeing you again this Friday! We'll be playing with rockets, potato guns (bulding our own!!), and using magical chemistry skills unlike the world has ever seen, making silly putty. :)

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Meeting Recaps

Thirteenth Meeting (April 20, 2007)

Ms. Nickerson and I ran clubs alone, since Peter and Vivek were off getting tuxedos fitted.

We made speakers out of wire and magnets, using a borrowed iPod as a sound source, and some other people tried to make electric motors. And some of us just had fun standing donut magnets up on edge on the table and rolling others around, making the stood-up ones spin nicely.

In our last meeting, one club member had conceived of an entirely new class of rocket: the Nocka Rocket, a.k.a. a hollow tinfoil tube with a pinched-off nose and a rocket jammed inside. This meeting, we actually went through with it. First we used a C-engine, and launched it out of the PVC launch tube. I didn’t even see the launch, ‘cause I was running through the play structure to get to Nocka and help him with the feisty igniter when he got it to work. But I saw it in mid-air! It spun some, dove, “pop”ed and smoked.

Then we went back inside and did another one, only with a D engine instead. This one I did see. I launched it (again from the PVC tube), it spun, it dove, it exploded with a nice burst of flame. The end, time for lunch.

Fourteenth Meeting (April 27, 2007)

Finally, we build bridges! Or try, anyway. In truth, after we split up into two groups, we never got far beyond the planning phase. We intended to continue in the next meeting, but we ended up having to take a break because of club member absences and such.

Fifteenth Meeting (May 4, 2007)

Hey, May the Fourth be with you!

We prepared three rockets. One was a long, thin, sleek black thing that Brendan found in The Closet. The second was a classic Nocka Rocket, only with a special plastic Charzard nose cone (which we lost). The third was a glider rocket that Brendan found and, with help, assembled. The first went off nicely, like so:


Video: BSEC 06-07: 15th Meeting: Rocket Launch

The second did what our made-from-scratch rockets normally do: launch, spin, nose-dive, explode. And the third we didn't have a chance to launch. That'll have to wait until another meeting.

Other than that? Umm, well, I do think I'm forgetting something, but I don't know what. Oh, we had Tootsie Pops, I think. But no, there was something else...

Sixteenth Meeting (May 11, 2007)

This Friday was a special schedule day, thanks to it being the Seniors' last day. (Congratulations to them, by the way!) As such, we had only about half the time we usually have--and half the attendance, too. We played briefly with LEGO MindStorms robots, mainly having them smash into each other so wee could see which one was stronger. It's fun to watch the wheels skitter about when they've been knocked off but remain wired to the control box.

Aside from that, we continued preparing our second glider rocket of the year.

Ninth Meeting: 8 Flips, Looking to the Future

We had our ninth meeting last Friday. We learned a bit about electricity from Peter, shocked ourselves (literally), and launched two rockets. The first was a stunning success, a.k.a. didn't catch fire and survived the whole flight. It shot up and deployed two little gliders, which we never found. But the main body survived! We haven't done that in quite a while!

And the second one... well, let's let it speak for itself. :)


Video: BSEC 06-07 - Flip Clip

More video coming soon, if I can figure out how to free up some space on my computer. (Wanna guess how much I have? Try 895 MB. We started out with 148 GB. That's digital video for ya.)

Looking to the Future

We'll looking at meeting every week from now on, starting... when? Next Friday? Let us know whether you're free during A Block.

Oh, and we're also actually starting our egg launch contest and possibly bridge-building.

As always, we welcome (solicit, even!) your feedback and ideas.

Seventh Meeting: Music, Dry Ice, and Rockets

Today we had our seventh BSEC meeting of the year. At the start, Ms. Nickerson had set up some music-related booths for us, including a rather nifty lollipop thingy. Next we somehow acquired some dry ice--I'm still not sure how--and blew up another bottle. Kind of. It only blew up once Ms. Nickerson tried to defuse it, naturally. The next bottle was a total dud.

By that time we had pulled out the rocketry stuff and were plotting two launches. The first would finally make use of Vivek's X-Wing that had been sitting in the closet for 1 1/2 years; the second would make use of, umm, some cardboard and tape and all the rocket engines we could find. (That only means four, alas.)

The X-Wing performed beautifully, right up until, uh, the point at which it nose-dived into the ground. Parachute? Yeah, we had a parachute. Problem is, it deployed about a yard above the ground... and it had a hole. Or two. Not much of a help.

Of course, we'd have been crazy to bother with a parachute on our other project: a cardboard tube with two cardboard wings held together with a little masking tape. (Far more sophisticated than our "rocket javelin" from last time, you see.) The nose-cone, though, was decidedly less sophisticated. At first we had a weight in there, to make it less tail-heavy, but at the last moment ripped it out. (That had grave consequences later on.)

So on that launch the rocket went up like it was supposed to, but then twirled and twisted and dove straight at the crowd of observers. Several people dove to the ground; a couple actually tripped over each other. I'm amazed nobody got burnt. Luckily, the body tube soon detached and left the crowd alone, instead landing right next to the launch pad. A few seconds passed, and then the next stage activated. Only, our pitiful replacement for the weighted nose cone -- aka a bit of tape -- didn't hold. The remaining rockets shot out the front of the tube and streaked into the air... and then landed in the pool.

Interesting experience. Video embedded below:


Video: BSEC 06-07 - Seventh Meeting in Under 5 Minutes

Sixth Meeting: Rocket Javelin

Compared to our Fifth Meeting--when we made dry ice bombs, burned random things, fired the potato gun, smashed a PC monitor to bits, and launched a four-stage rocket car--this meeting was downright boring. But it was fun, especially towards the end. :D

We started out with the intent of making circuits and, ultimately, a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that would launch a rocket. But we skipped most of that. :)

We wanted to launch a rocket out of the potato gun. There would be very little point, except that it would be, uh, kinda a 'rocket laucher' of sorts. To fit down the barrel we couldn't use a rocket with fins, so we made one from scratch. It was an extremely complicated design: a cardboard tube, a makeshift paper nose, and a D engine stuffed up the back and secured with masking tape. We put a few party poppers in, in the hope that they would, y'know, pop. Oh, and I snuck a little bonus surprise in there... more on that later.

We tried using the potato gun, but it was virtually impossible to attack the leads to the rocket. In the mean time we amused ourselves with some silly string, which ultimately ended up All. Over. The field. We had initially tried dropping the rocket down and then reaching through the hole in the chamber, but it was too cramped for such a delicate operation. Next we tried threading the wire through the barrel and holding the rocket in place, just poking out the end. We were going to attach it with some of the copious silly string lying around until I remembered that we had tape inside.

On that attempt, though, one of the leads had come disconnected. Awwww.

People were getting bored, so we just put the "rocket javelin" it on top of a chair and launched it. Oh boy was that interesting. After circling several times, bouncing off the ground, and coming to a rest facing the opposite direction from the way it had been launched, people decided it was safe to approach. Willy set off at a sprint.

Here's where my surprise comes in. You see, I had decided that it would be more interesting if there was a second engine inside. And I kinda forgot to tell anyone.

So at this point the rocket shot off again. The second engine was much smaller, so it just kinda skittered across the ground. But I sure am glad no one had picked it up.

Oh, and then it caught on fire.

See for yourself:


Video: BSEC 06-07 - Sixth Meeting in Five Minutes

Third Meeting: Van de Graaff Generator & Rocket Dune Buggy

Last Friday, the 10th of November, we held our third meeting. We started off by playing around with a Van de Graaff generator, which went quite well. I've never seen so many people so eager to hurt themselves. It's a bit disconcerting, actually.

We started off with some, ahem, shocking high-fives. Then it progressed to fist pounds and even a slap or two accross the face. Several people formed a long chain to extend their collective reach.

Then, by special request, we learned a bit about nukes. Unfortunately, the person who requested it was absent that day, so it was totally pointless and I apologize for wasting your precious time.

Once we were done with that we strapped a rocket engine to Tyler's GI Joe dune buggy. Unfortunately, it was a lot heavier than I had anticipated, so we sent it... uh... flying a whole ten feet. :) Well, to look on the bright side, that's about 8 feet farther than I thought it would go.

Check out the videos:


Video: VanDeGraaf Shocks All


Video: Rocket Car

Potato Gun v. Balloons

Any guesses what'll happen? Mmm? Any?

We tried this in the club Friday, but didn't have time to get it to work. Well, today we did. Enjoy... and start thinking about what we should shoot at our next meeting!


Video: Potato Gun v. Balloons

P.S. Sorry about the totally out-of-sync audio...
EDIT: Fixed audio by using MSN Soapbox instead of YouTube.