5.08.2012

Cracking the Egg Mystery

My radar for egg-related content has been on this year.  A little background: one of my IB Art students has created an incredible new club at our school, known as "Eggschange" .  Jin Jin and her club raise money to buy chickens for poor local farmers.  They then buy the eggs from the farmers, sell the organic eggs to the community, and then use the money to buy more chickens.  Its an amazing project, and she was just featured in a local magazine along with some other local 'green heroes'.  You can read the online article here.

Now, IB Art is all about making connections to your personal life, and Jin Jin is all about eggs.  So when I heard this week's Science Friday podcast about the mystery of the spinning eggs, I had to share it with my IB Art class.


Even though this is a science podcast, this is completely an IB project.  One thing that they don't reference in the video, which is mentioned on the podcast, is that the original idea of the egg spinning in milk came from Truscott's teacher who was interested in photography.  This was, apparently, a trick that photographers would use to get cool fast shutter speed shots.  Truscott's interest as an engineer translated this photography technique into an engineering investigation, and even suggests use for pumps without internal parts.  Again- that's a photography trick that turned into a plan for a new kind of pump! Brilliant.

In the context of the video, they discuss using different shapes, objects, liquids of various viscosity as they investigated the physics behind why this was happening.  That sort of deep, guided investigation is the perfect example of how to approach their workbooks.


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