Our team held our first 'Science for All' workshop on Sunday, in which we introduced ourselves to the children and held a small ice-breaker activity with Simon Says. While some of the older children could understand English, many of the younger ones only knew Hindi, which made it difficult for us to communicate, even to explain the rules of the game. We ended up playing the game a few times ourselves to show them how it's done before playing it all together.
For our first ever experiment, we chose Milk Marbling Experiment, a simple yet engaging experiment to explain the concept of surface tension. We demonstrated it, then gave each of them the materials to try it themselves.
In the experiment, the children could notice how the color drops would move apart and swirl around when soap comes in contact with milk. The surface of the milk has something called surface tension—it’s like a stretchy skin that holds everything in place. Water is made up of tiny molecules that are attracted to each other and stick together. The molecules at the surface of the milk are pulled inwards by the other molecules below it, so surface tension is created and holds the droplets together, preventing them from moving. Now, soap breaks the surface tension because it wants to grab onto the fat in the milk. As the soap molecules chase the fat molecules, the surface tension breaks apart, causing the colors to move and swirl around.
Most of the children had never done anything like this, so they were all very eager to participate. Since it was our first time, there were some situations we didn't expect to happen (because we're working with younger kids), such as one of the kids spilling a bit of the milk on the floor and a few slight misunderstandings in the instructions of the experiment, but I think we managed it fairly well. I'm sure we'll do an even better job the next time.
We also had a simple worksheet for them to answer after the experiment (it asked them what they observed)- the younger kids drew pictures instead of writing and the older kids were of tremendous help. We ended the session by handing out the snacks we prepared to each of them and taking a group picture. I hope that they were able to have fun while doing the activities and that they were able to learn something new from the workshop- who knows, some of them may want to become future scientists through this! The children were all very sweet, and I absolutely loved getting to know the kids and talking with them. I'm already looking forward to our next meeting with them!
Comments