Grade 8

I had many requests for a step by step instruction of making the "Hydraulic Crane".

Although this wasn't my construction (one of my brilliant students did this one for a project that I assigned), I can figure out the basics from what I saw.

Note: The following is only meant as a start for anyone that wants to try this project. However, everyone has their own twist to every assignment, every design. Use your imagination to make the crane better, and your own!

Materials:

• 30 mL syringes (x8)
• dialysis tubing (or any other kind of plastic tubing for connecting the syringes together)
• wood (for crane construction and for base)
• anchors (to hold the tubing in place)
• bottle with water (or any other weight to counter balance the crane arm)
• a scoop (any kind of shovel)
• Screws / Nails / Nuts / Bolts
• + Other miscellaneous materials.

Procedure

This quiz is designed for grade 8 students testing them on fluids - specifically on Viscosity, Density and Buoyancy of fluids. The quiz should take 30 - 40 minutes and has great questions on those three topics, including Archimedes principle and some thinking problems using density and viscosity and buoyancy.

This is a great quiz about the microscope. It should take about half a period. It's meant for grade 8, but I can see it being useful in grade 6 to grade 9 (any time you teach the microscope). There are some questions on independent, dependent and controlled variables also, and the scientific method.

Note: Microscope diagram not included for the first question - you must get one of your own.

Hydraulics and Pneumatics are great topics to teach children. First of all both words sound very impressive and when the children learn these words they will sound very important and knowledgeble if they use them. Also, hydraulics and pneumatics are used in many machines and in many everyday applications, therefore it is easy to show the importance of understanding these topics. One can easily show and explain the difference between hydraulics and pneumatics - a great "Compare and Contrast" analysis. Thirdly, there are many fun and impressive experiments that can be done with hydraulics and pneumatics in a very inexpensive way, with very accessible materials. And finally, since hydraulics and pneumatics is so useful, there can be multiple projects that children can actually build themselves. Thus weaker students and stronger science students can both do projects, yet with differing complexity.

This project was introduced after teaching the class about simple machines. It was a great and fun way to summarize the whole unit: to build a Rube Goldberg Machine.

Have fun.

For the optics unit project, I decided to have the students create a picture book with Optics as the title. Each student is doing a page spread on a different sub-topic and then we'll combine all the pages and print them as a whole book. All the page-spreads need to be done on computer with the same layout, then handed in to me as a .pdf. At the end, the students will get a book of all these topics, one of the pages being theirs., the rest will come from their peers.

This is a small quiz for scientific notation.  Shouldn't take longer than ten minutes.  The level is junior high school, and in particular, grades 8 or 9.