I’ve just been playing A some of the ThruYou videos (see the mother of all funk chords post) and after the jungle-ish one ended she said “Turn it off. Bit loud.” Last night I got my first “I wuv oo Daddy” from her, which was very nice indeed. She’s also developed the handy phrase “Where’s-a Mummy doin’?”.
I’ll leave Katy to fill in the weekday stuff as it largely didn’t involve me, but I’ll try to catch up last weekend and today. Tadcu (my father-in-law i.e. the children’s grandfather who lives in Wales – hence the name) came over last weekend. He’s going to be doing Kentwell (hurray!) and so had to go to an open day, and stayed with us on the way. While he was doing that on the Saturday we hit the Science Festival, which pretty much ends this weekend. As I was walking back to get the car today I thought “This is all free, lots of fun and educational too – we really ought to get more organised next year and have far-away home ed. friends over for one or other of the weekends so they could do it too.”
Back to last weekend. J nearly didn’t do any as his behaviour had been so bad. He managed to bring it back to missing some of the things that we’d booked for him (L went in his place.) In the morning we saw Lucy Hawking (Stephen’s daughter) give a talk about their forthcoming book about space and the solar system, went to a lecture on ice-cream, and learned a bit about the physics of bicycles and then made our own out of construction straws, pipe cleaners and plasticene. The ice-cream lecture had a polished, corporate presentation by a bloke from Unilever about making Vienettas and so on, then some students made some ice cream using liquid nitrogen, cocoa and other things which largely ended up on the floor! There were free samples (made by Mr. Ben and Mr. Jerry – yum!).
Anglia Ruskin University (the former poly in Cambridge) had their own stuff going on in the Guildhall which was near the main science site. It was great for both universities to get involved, and to use non-lab buildings too. J got to play with a theremin and an oscilloscope hooked up to a couple of signal generators, and they all got to play hula hoop on Wii Fit courtesy of the Sports Science people.
We’d managed to get tickets to the big experiment place – usually we’re not that organised. On the way in there was a fantastic simple demonstration to show the shape of air bubbles in water. They’re not balls or tear-drops, they’re jelly-fish shaped. After doing the main experiments place we found that the only thing still open was material science, which I’d never been into before despite having had my lectures very near when I was a student. This was probably the most fun of the day.
There was a ferro-magnetic liquid in a beaker – it looks like thin motor oil until you put a magnet underneath, which made it stick up like an oily hedgehog. There was a big tray of iron filings with an enormous magnet underneath, and you could put on gloves and then have a play – literally hands-on with magnetism. I saw what looked like a standard issue mad scientist bubbling cauldron, but there was no chemistry involved – a bowl of water with an ultrasonic loudspeaker in the bottom. The vibrations from the speaker shook droplets of water away from the surface of the water to form a cloud just above it.
Back home tired, but having had fun and learned a thing or two. On Sunday Katy was preaching in the morning. Tadcu took K and L off to West Stow as it was doing Anglo-Saxon technology as part of the science festival. A, J, Katy and I went to the church which is just round the corner from where we used to live. The thought of going there doesn’t usually fill us with joy, partly because it’s in a relatively rough part of town, and partly because it’s pretty much run by one family, the patriarch of which is a my-way-or-the-high-way kind of man with theology to match. In the end it wasn’t as bad I feared, because he seems to be taking a back seat and his son’s taking over, who is more laid back. We then zoomed off to West Stow to join the others.
There wasn’t as much going on as we thought there’d be, and also not as many visitors as we were expecting. We looked around the reconstructed buildings, admired the pole lathe, Tadcu whittled sticks a bit and had a go at archery. K and L had had a go before we arrived, so I queued with J – it seemed unusual for an adult to be doing it, but I wasn’t going to miss it in a hurry as I have long wanted to have a go. The man doing it had lots of different bows for children and adults. J used a modern bow with pulleys and a strange shape, and then a baby longbow – he did quite well. I had a go with a longbow with a 35lb pull (how hard you have to pull on the string to get the bow to bend – proper battle ones had a 90lb pull and these days could put an arrow through a car door). It was fantastic! The closest thing to how it felt was maybe a John McEnroe style serve in tennis – you wind yourself up to store energy and then release it in one go and watch something fly smoothly (you hope). There’s a very good playground in the car park, and the kids all had fun (until L got tired and then got sand in her eye => wailing).
At the risk of making this War and Peace, I’ll fast forward to today. We stared in a gentle lie-ins kind of way, and then Science Festival part 2 (or 3, depending on how you’re counting). The Maths Centre out to the west is another place I’d not been to before – mostly because it hadn’t been built when I was a student. I must confess I wasn’t expecting it to be loads of fun for young children, but then I hadn’t realised that much of it was in the applied maths department which means fluids, which means water, sand, golden syrup and air (and traffic flows, muesli, blood and other interesting things).
The most fun bit was the high speed cameras usually used for worthy research, but this time used to catch the dying moments of water balloons as children dropped them! They all had a go, got more or less wet and saw amazing images of the balloons deforming before they burst – K’s started off normal and ended up looking like a cottage loaf. There was a swirling vortex thing, so I asked the research student what the best way was to stir a cup of tea to mix the milk in – should it be round and round, or more random to jumble it all up? He wasn’t sure as there were several effects going on at once, but fortunately one of the professors knew that it was round and round (I forget the details of the explanation). But it depends on the thickness of what you’re stirring, so paint and treacle should be more random, and maybe tea if you put loooooads of sugar in it.
J and K had a sit in front of the thermal imaging cameras, that showed the heat from your hand warming up the air above it, and also the warm air coming out of your nose and mouth – we have two dragons in the family. We learned that the stickiness of air keeps you alive – it means that when you breathe out it forms a jet and travels far away, so that when you breathe in (from all around) you’re breathing largely fresh air. If the jet didn’t happen when you breathed out, you’d be continually rebreathing the same air which would get less and less rich in oxygen.
We also learned the fastest way to empty a bottle of water – swirl it around to make a vortex like an emptying bath, so that the water stays around the edges to leave a gap up the middle for the air to get in. Most of this was with J, E and S and their parents, which was nice, plus half of another local home ed. family briefly. There was a golden syrup sewing machine (hard to explain, but made pretty patterns), and a thing showing avalanches in sand forming in waves, and a big tank of water for making water waves.
When we got up to the main bit I bumped into a former colleague, a friend from college, and a neighbour from our old house. The friend from college is now part of NRICH, so I told him how J had been enjoying it. J, K and L got a creme egg each from a loud mathmo with an air-zooka, and K was chief record taker for a demonstration that used a pack of cards to show how measles spreads.
The vet school is where Big Alice’s mum works, and another place I’d never been to. So we ran there to catch the last hour or so and meet Big Alice. There were some alpacas and 2 week old calves, a plastic back end of a cow for practising for those James Herriot oops-where’s-my-arm moments (that had been used as a lucky dip for sweets(!) but was empty by the time we got there), and some rather grim bugs to look at under microscopes. It was weird being on a small farm that was part of the university and right next to the maths, physics and computing departments.
Big Alice was doing snakes with her mum, and they all said hello to her and the snakes. While we chilling (parents) or going loopy (children) on the grass outside Big Alice finished her stint and then came out and presented them with some full snake skins that had been shed – made K very chuffed.
Then across the road to astronomy, to show Katy where the boys do their astronomy club. Painting of polystyrene balls to be planets, watching a demo of a computer program that’s only impressive if you know what’s going on (N body simulation) and then I headed off to get the car and left the others looking at moon rocks or something.
Photos on Flickr (with more on Monday) and tomorrow we’ll be sleeping, catching up on housework and other boring but necessary things like that.
What I’ve also loved about the Science Festival is how we’ve all got very different things out of it – fantastic. The maths dept was particularly recommended to me by HE-er who’s been going for about a decade but we didn’t manage that yesterday. Must not be ill next year.
We nearly took the SOTP-ers but then there was a singing competition that was on, then wasn’t, then was or something – which reminds me we need to try and sort another date out with them.
Sounds like an excellent time was had