Voices College-Bound Language Academy Franklin McKinley
Sept 2019 - March 2020
Opportunity X representatives: Pujita Tangirala, Sneha Revanur
Sponsoring Teacher: Rodrigo Soto
9/24/2019 Introduction
Students were introduced to Opportunity X and the concept of science research and the scientific method.
10/01/2019 Optics
Students were taught the concepts of concave and convex lenses and mirrors. Applying these concepts, students used magnifying glasses to invert images upside down and magnify them. Students used magnifying glasses to concentrate sunlight on a piece of paper and start a fire!
10/08/2019 Strawberry DNA
Students were introduced to chemistry and biology with this project. Using detergent, salt, and water, students were able to extract real DNA from crushed up strawberries!
10/15/2019 Homemade Ice Cream
Students learned about boiling and freezing points. Using salt, students lowered the freezing point of ice, therefore allowing a mix of milk, cream, and sugar to freeze into ice cream.
10/22/2019 Egg Drop
Students were introduced to engineering through a problem solving challenge. Given a limited amount of materials, students were expected to build a device that would keep an egg from breaking when dropped from a height.
10/29/2019 Catapult Engineering Challenge
Students were given another engineering challenge. This time, with a very specific amount of materials, students were expected to build a device that could throw a ball into a cup from a certain distance.
11/5/2019 Lava Lamps & Skittles
Students learned about density by combining water, oil, alka seltzer, and food coloring to make lava lamps. They also were able to see liquids of different densities separate when putting skittles in water.
11/12/2019 Video Game Reaction Time
Students were able to test if people who played video games had a quicker reaction time than people who did not by seeing how fast they could catch a ruler.
11/19/2019 Gummy Drop Bridges
Students used gummy drops and toothpicks to build bridges. We had a competition to see whose bridge could hold the most pennies in a cup. Students learned about the properties of bridges and how to design strong structures.
11/26/2019 Slime
Students used glue, food coloring, baking soda, and contact solution to make slime.
12/03/2019 Individual Project Brainstorm / Science Fair Workshop
Students worked on brainstorming projects for the Opportunity X Science Fair. They learned about how to apply the scientific method, and came up with their own Question, Hypothesis, and preliminary Procedure.
2/05/2020 Friction
Students learned about friction by overlapping the pages of two books and trying to pull them apart. They also observed how a crushed up paper falls faster than a normal one because of lower friction from the air. Lastly, they tested the speed of an object on a ramp with different materials.
2/12/2020 Surface Tension
Students learned about surface tension by putting food coloring in milk and watching how soap would break this surface tension, making the colors move outward and form patterns.
2/23/2020 Invisible Ink
Students used white crayon, grape juice, and lemon juice + a heat source to try different types of invisible ink.
03/04/2020 Density
Students mixed oil and water to explore density. Additionally, they added food coloring to see what would happen.
