STEM Outreach: Adopt... Adapt... Accomplish
From Rick McMaster
 I mentioned in my last column that I was developing an adaptation of the density activity for November’s Science Thursday. The La Belle: The Ship That Changed History exhibit opened at the Bullock Texas State History Museum with a Members-only night that more than 1400 attended. Archeologists and other experts have begun the process of reassembling the ship timber by timber in the gallery. When the reconstruction is complete, the hull will be moved a few yards to become the centerpiece of a completely revamped first floor.
Buoyancy is very important to ships like La Belle so I took the density experiment and adapted it to a station where the students could quickly experience density hands-on. We had 8, 12, and 16 pound bowling balls and a big plastic storage box filled near  the top with water for a large scale demo. A volunteer handled that part of the station. He also had two dozen of the plastic eggs each filled with one to 12 metal washers. The eggs were sealed (but not well enough as we found) and color coded from pink with one or two washers to purple with 11 or 12. The students had the opportunity to hold the eggs and guess which would float or sink. They did not have a way to measure the density and generally they overestimated the density of the green eggs which contained 7 or 8 washers and guessed they would sink.
I was inspired by the story of the Swedish warship, Vasa, which was armed with bronze cannons and highly decorated and thus unstable due to her high center of gravity. The object of our second station was to determine how to load a barge or ship with the  maximum cargo. We used a plastic tray and a dessert bowl to represent the barge or ship respectively, along with the same metal washers we used in the eggs. The challenge was to load as many of the washers onto the vessel before it sank. In this activity, the students lined up in two queues, one for the tray and one for the dessert bowl. Each student added a washer and moved to the end of the line. The student at the front of the line received a lot of suggestions on where to put his or her washer. At the end of Science Thursday, the record for both the barge and the ship was 35 washers as cargo, weighing in at almost ½ pound!
 We used the large Austin room at the museum for our third La Belle activity, Designing and Racing Boats!  This activity comes from The Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago and its Summer Brain Games. (Check out all their resources from the past three years.) We made a few changes for our environment and plan to keep this activity through May when reconstruction of La Belle is complete. We used the same dessert bowls for the hulls as we did in the loading activity above, provided foam craft sheets for sail material, and constructed our waterways with 6” half-round galvanized steel gutter to assure they would last for several months. We soon found that many of the ships were unstable like the Vasa and added our multiuse metal washers as ballast to the supplies  available to the students. There were many different and creative designs since we did not limit the use of any of the materials.
In addition to the three maritime activities we had our Van de Graaff generator, representing our always changing and sometime extreme Texas weather and ZOOM’s Puff-mobile for the wind power generated in our state.
My thanks to Stephen, a grad student at UT, to Janek, Lauren, and Masar from IBM to Walter from 3M who is there for every Science Thursday explaining static electricity, and to Kaitlin from the Bullock, our “Social Engineer” who makes sure that all runs smoothly.
I’ll be back again next month. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or like Central Texas Discover Engineering on facebook for science and math tidbits that catch our fancy.
Rick McMaster retired from IBM as the STEM Advocate in December 2013, but continues his work in “STEM and more” through occasional tweets and blogging, continuing to serve on various technical boards, and chairing the Central Texas Discover Engineering outreach. You can reach him at drrhmcm@gmail.com, for continuing discussion. He believes that you can’t start too early to form the “T”.
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