Your equipment should be already set for dialing phone numbers (by pulse or by tone). Use the 80() toll-free number for one of the College of Education FrEdMail computers: (1-800-527-9937). Be sure to be sure to dial all the numbers. You may get a busy tone. Afternoons tend to be busy times, and some people stay on the line a long time. Early mornings or early evenings are best. If your district has its own FrEdMail Board, it may be easier to go through that board rather than the 800 number. But try it! You may be lucky.
If you enjoy using FrEdMail, you will want to have your own sign on. You can get this by typing NEW and answering the questionnaire. However, to get computer access to the Science Network’s QUEST, your school should be paying the subscription for the research service. Researching questions is time-consuming and we enjoy it, but we do need to cover some of the costs with subscriptions. If you receive this newsletter, you may assume your school is a subscriber. To subscribe to QUEST, send a message to JEASLEY@UIUCED2 using FrEdmail (or through the US mail) and request your name be added to the list of subscribers to QUEST (see address in the back of the newsletter).
You don't need the official name and password of someone who has obtained an official sign on just to browse around in the public boards: Idea Exchange, Kids News Service, or System News. But you will need permission to get into QUEST. Individuals on the Kankakee District 111 math/science magnet staff are currently being added.
If you enter your name as "New" or "Guest" you will immediately be able to browse the three public boards. It takes time to do so, because some messages are long, and there is no easy way to quit until you get to the end.
Once you have a "sign-on" and we have given you permission to use QUEST, you can see all the questions that subscriber schools have sent in and the answers we found for them. You can also type in new questions, and read new answers when they have been prepared.
FrEdMail HINTS:
The idea of FrEdMail is that there are different levels of commands you can make. Each command is entered by a letter from a list or menu. Watch out because the meanings of the letters are not always the same depending on which level you are in If you have any doubt, you can type a question mark "?" when the list of letters appears and you will be told what each means.
Q is always for quitting the particular board. However,
when you come to the main command, to quit FrEdMail, you type G
(for Goodbye--It's more polite than Quit, I suppose!). Two more returns
are needed to get you out, unless you want to leave a comment for the system
operator.
| If you already have an account on the QUEST Board please read these
instructions carefully:
|
||
| I understand some people are having trouble sending questions through
the network. It is really very simple, here are the instructions.
l. Turn on your modem and load your communications program 2. Dial the QUEST Board toll free number 1 -800-527-9937 3. Type your name and password 4. Type B (for bulletin boards) 5. Type D (QUEST board) 6. Type T (To Type questions using the proper heading) 7. Type 2 (network, Board 1& 2) 8. After SUBJ: you type in your school code, grade, and subject. ex:
9. At the " 1 " prompt, type questions into the board. 10. Type S (to save and send the questions) We will receive it
on the board and we will answer it and send it back. So you need to check
the QUEST board daily.
If you have any questions about the headings read message 2S on the QUEST Board #1! --THN |
Here’s a question asked by a second grade science magnet student from William Howard Taft Elementary School, Kankakee, IL.
Q1. Do guinea pigs have a sense of smell?
A1. Yes, their sense of smell is very good. Studies
have been done and they show that the guinea pig is more content in an
area where the odors are recognizable. -- THN
Q2. Why is it hotter in the summer and colder in the winter? I just heard a talk about the season, which discussed how textbooks present the science behind the seasons. Typically, textbooks focus on the fact that the sun is higher in the summer, and so the sun's rays are more concentrated (and thus warm things up more). But, it is also the case that days are longer in the summer, and thus there's a longer time for things to warm up (and a shorter at night) during which things can cool down. My question is: which of the two factors is more important for making the summer hotter than the winter?
A2. In regards to your question, the sun effects
the temperature of the earth due to the angle of the sun, not the duration
of the day. Although the earth does store up heat from radiated energy,
it doesn't effect the temperature much. We know this because of the North
and South Poles. It's either night or day, twenty-four hours a day and
the temperatures are always freezing. The rays of the sun are not direct
enough (figure 1). This only happens because the Earth is tilted on its
axis. This causes the Sun's rays to hit the surface at an angle, causing
much of the heat to bounce off.
I don't know much about the
temperature at the poles, but I once spent a month up in Fairbanks, Alaska,
during July, and it got quite hot there! And I was told by some of my students
there from the North Slope that it was quite warm there in the summer (warm
enough to melt the ice on the ocean) for a month or so in Barrow, which
is about 75 degrees North latitude. How could we estimate the relative
contributions of the sun angle and the length of the day to the mean temperature?
I really didn't know where to look for the answer to this question so I called the Atmospheric Science Department. I spoke with John Walsh and he helped answer the question. There is a mathematical formula to figure out the exact percentage of the ratio. For the most part, the Sun's ray: account for more than six times the energy than that of the photo period. Now, if you could compress the day length and have a constant angle of the sun's rays, the energy from the photo period and the rays would be almost equal (40-60%). -- THN
Q3. Does an elephant have an exceptionally
large, strong heart- to pump blood all through its large body?
 |
A3. Yes. On the average. elephants weighing
two and a half metric tons (2,500 kg) have hearts that weigh 11 kg (about
27 pounds, more than any turkey weighs 1 \c seen lately). But with these
big heart pumping away, elephants produce less than half of the blood pressure
of the human heart.
|
Q4. What are turtle shells made of?
| A4. The inside parts of a turtle shell are made of bone. Also, the turtle's backbone and ribs are connected to bony plates cleat are joined all around, like a skull. Then there are scales, which cover the outside of the bony plates. They are made of horn. The same stuff the horns of cows or goats arc made of. The bony plates are produced by the turtle's skin, like our skull bones are. The horny scales are also produced by the skin, sort of like our finger and toe nails. which, though thinner are made out of Cry similar material. Horn-like materials are also found in fish scales. snake scales. bird feathers, horses' hooves. and the horns of animals. |  |
Q5. How does your brain think?
A5. Really, we still don't know exactly.
The human brain is one of the most complicated computers in existence,
and it thinks far better than the computers that people have made. One
way some professors (e.g., Marvin Minsky at MIT) describe holy the brain
works is to say it is like a lot of people talking to each other at once,
like sometimes happens in a classroom. Newer computers are often made to
work that way too. Sometimes our brain doesn't work like we want it to.
When that happens, we can see a little bit about how it does work.
For example, sometimes, when I go to my room to get something, I forget what I went for and have to go back to where I started to remember what it was I needed. Did that ever happen to you? I'll try to explain that by comparing my brain to a class of children. Let me tell you about a classroom.
A boy in a story the teacher was reading, named Billy, said he wanted to be a trapeze artist when he grew up. When Susan, a student in the class, asked what a "trapeze" was, another child started to say that it's something he saw at a circus. Then six children who had just been to the started talking about what they saw at the circus, but none of them mentioned trapezes. The teacher asked why everyone was talking about the circus, who they went with, and the clowns they saw outside. Nobody could remember. Susan, who had asked about the trapeze, got bored and started looking out the window, and she didn't even hear the teacher's question. Those who were telling about the circus were so excited they couldn't think about anything else, so they didn't answer either. The teacher then said, "All right, that's enough about the circus, I want to finish reading this story to you," and then the teacher read the same sentence again about what Billy said about wanting to become a trapeze artist, and Susan, who asked about it before, woke up and asked what a trapeze was again. So they had to talk about the circus all over again, but this time they included the trapeze acts they saw in the circus so Susan would find out what a trapeze was.
Now, what about my brain when I go to my room and forget what I wanted to get? My brain must be sort of like that class. There are lots of parts of the brain, like all the different children in the classroom, and the different parts know about different things. When the eyes and ears and other senses send messages to the brain, some of the parts of the brain wake up and say, "That's like the bug I saw with my magnifier, yesterday, when I was in my room. " Another part of my brain says, " Yes, I left my magnifier up there," and one part knows where I left it and starts organizing other parts of my brain to go to get it. So the parts in my brain that know how to get there set my leg muscles working to go and get it. However, on the way, other parts of my brain wake up when I see the cat and the dog, who want to go outside, and the TV which is showing a rerun of my favorite show. The pans of my brain that knew what was missing go to sleep, like Susan did, before the parts guiding my trip get me to my room. So I have to walk all the way back to the living room and see the bug again before I remember what I went upstairs for. This time, that part of my brain keeps awake until I get there, so it won't happen again. Not all parts of the brain can be active at once or it gets too confusing, just like a class, if everyone talks loud at once, some people start to tune out.
Do you think your brain works like mine, or is it different? One of the hard questions is what happens in your brain when you really understand something, like when you add and when you subtract. --JE
Miss Thompson's and Mrs. Leben's Sixth Grade Science Classes, Prospect School
Q6. In science, we are working on layering liquids. We layered corn syrup and liquid detergent. The liquid detergent "floated" on the corn syrup because of unequal densities. After layering them, we shook the two liquids together in a closed bottle. We left the corn syrup and liquid detergent over Thanksgiving for five days without shaking or moving the bottle. We are wondering why the liquids didn't layer out again?
A6. Liquids: Detergent molecules are long skinny molecules that have one end that likes water and one end that likes oil and grease. That is why detergent is so good for cleaning oily things in water. It hooks the oily molecules together with the water.
With no detergent to hook them together, oil and water don't like each other and separate. Corn syrup has a lot of water in it and, when you shook corn syrup up with detergent, the detergent molecules hooked onto the water molecules in the syrup, and they didn't let go.
If you shake oil and water together, they will separate again, because there is no place on the oil molecules for the water to hook on. There, the oil molecules only like other oil molecules, and the water molecules also stay together with water molecules for the same reason. But, in corn syrup, the water molecules and the detergent molecules hook together and don't let go. --JE
Q7. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. If
it were to explode, would the remaining particles give off harmful toxins?
A7. Probably not too much, because it seems
that Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune are mostly made of hydrogen, helium,
oxygen, and nitrogen, and only small amounts of metals. Of course, ammonia
can be made of nitrogen and hydrogen, and ammonia is toxic. So it is possible,
but these are not as poisonous as methane, which is made of carbon and
hydrogen, and cyanide, which includes carbon and nitrogen, or mercury which
comes out of rocks. Toxins do not seem as likely to come from these very
light, giant planets, as they would if Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars would
explode. Scientists are not expecting an explosion of any planet. But,
in about a trillion years, (1,000,000,000 years) the sun, which is much
bigger, but made out of the same stuff as Jupiter, might burn out and swell
up big enough to swallow the earth. Any humans who had not migrated to
other, safer places by then would burn up too, whether there are any toxins
or not. -- JE
These questions and answers are on the QUEST board,
and I am hoping you can both read and print them out, so that in the future
we can use the slightly faster computer rather than the US mail.
Differences in perception between people who have different experiences, training, and orientation are nowadays used a lot to explain why well-meaning and competent people unwittingly interfere with each -others' goals. Various situations, from family conflicts to international tensions are often approached in this way. What is seldom done, however, is to look at the daily routine of teaching and learning in the same way. Marvin Minsky's book, The Society of the Mind, helps us see enough of the common sense, but very modern, mechanisms of learning and thinking in ordinary situations for us to make applications to almost anything. Reds of mental agents are available to our thoughts, but because of complex communication pathways in the society of the mind they can't always find out when they might be needed. It is as through they fall asleep and have to be specially wakened. Eleanor Duckworth's book, "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" and other essays, gives us real children's and real teachers' thinking and a very positive tone. Wally's Stories, by Vivian Paley, gives us transcriptions of tape-recorded children's conversations in her kindergarten class, plus her frank appraisals from her point of view as teacher. So we can apply Minsky's social theory of mind to these two real-life sources as well as to the daily contacts we have with each other in schools.
When a second grade child asked the Science Network, "How does the brain work?" I looked at books on neural networks, and the psychology of cognition and found nothing I thought I could explain to second graders. However, Minsky's book, a lecture about the society of mind theory by Seymour Papert (one of it's coinventors)which I had heard, and a N O V A program on artificial intelligence did give me something to say to second graders about how forgetting might work. (See above)
But I think I'd like to use the same theory also to explain common perceptions of error in arithmetic and science thinking in elementary school. A first grader wrote, " 1001 " for a hundred and one, and we can understand why. It's like spelling compound words or like Roman numerals. Thus, "Applepie" is spelled by tacking on one word after the other, and CI means 101 in Roman numerals. Of course, what is annoying is that the child seems to have forgotten the hours and hours spent on learning place value. That's like me (see my answer to the brain question) forgetting what it was I went to my room to get. Some other agents of the mind have temporarily taken over. It's the old transfer of learning problem people learn one thing in one context and don't think of it in another context because those agents that learned it don't get the message that they're needed. Teachers feel compelled, like me, to lead the class back to the context where the place value idea had been clear and then try to get the child to hold on tightly to that idea and move back into the context that produced "1001" for a hundred and one.
That remedy may solve this problem, like it did for me, but that remedy itself may not itself be available to solve the next problem that comes up. I have learned to recognize the trouble and use my strategy --go back to the other context (at least mentally), recover the other ideas (society of mind agents) and then keep them awake while coming back to the problem context. Children can learn a similar strategy, but it may take years of practice to learn to apply it well and habitually. Doing it is a "higher mental process," which the curriculum planners are interested in. It is to be clearly distinguished from "lower mental processes," like the memorized procedures of calculation or the mechanical steps of scientific method like Problem, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion. The important thing about higher processes we learn from Minsky's book is that they are ways of reorganizing our mental agents for more effective mental work like problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, etc.
Another example might help: Vivian Paley reports a discussion in her kindergarten class about making sugar out of sugar beets. One child has brought in a sugar beet, and it has been cut up and placed in hot water for an hour or so, and the water tasted to see that it is sweet. The children, however, propose better ways of making sugar: Add honey to the water to make it sweeter, add flour to make it white; don't add white shoe polish -- it is inedible; cook it to make it crunchy. Paley, their teacher, thinks these are illogical ideas, and is disappointed at the low level of thinking. I am impressed however because this is an alchemists' process of thinking from the 17th century: you make something new by combining things that have the properties you want (sweet, white, edible) and you use processes (cooking) that make desirable changes in their other properties (wet and sticky to dry and crunchy). I've read some of the history of how thinking about modern chemical elements evolved out of thinking about alchemists' properties. So I believe this property way of thinking is not only logical but productive. You can get from there to modern theories of chemistry through higher order mental processes. Low level processes like memorizing the table of chemical elements can only help you to memorize modern answers, not to develop higher processes or to arrive at a modern theoretical understanding.
Teachers naturally worry whether higher order mental processes which can be recognized by the pensive faces interrupted by "Aha!" are guaranteed to lead everyone to the right answers, to the modern, correct theories. Of course, there is no absolute guarantee -- but there is a better probability of their getting these that way than by lower mental processes. It seems that few people ever achieve understanding from memorization alone unless, they become very personally involved in questioning what they have been taught. Those natural skeptics are few and far between, so a teacher is better advised to promote higher level thinking for all pupils, as Paley did, even though some of what the children think up might seem wrong -- or illogical -- as the alchemist's process did to her.
Please submit questions or comments by FrEdMail to either:
JEASLEY@UIUCEDU TNEAL@UIUCEDU
either enter them in the QUEST board @UIUCEDII or send
them to us by mail to:
CIRCE, 270 EDUCATION
1310 S. SIXTH ST.
CHAMPAIGN, IL 61820