On September 6, 2020, volunteers from the Irvine branch of AYLUS hosted its second science exploratory class for the fall session. We used Zoom to host the lesson, and students, consisting of elementary and middle schoolers, had a great time participating.
Aditya and Andy taught about momentum and energy. Aditya once again started off with an experiment, this time asking the class whether a ping pong ball would bounce back to its original height. He then demonstrated the answer was no, it could not, and then asked whether dropping a soccer ball with a ping pong ball on top (like a snowman) would make the ping pong ball bounce any higher (which it did). After the experiment, Aditya talked about momentum, specifically its formula and the laws of conservation. He then proceeded to explain what energy was, how it related to work, and how energy is always conserved. Students seemed to be already familiar with the concept of energy conservation and knew multiple types of energy prior to the lesson. Andy then started teaching and went over the homework from the last lesson. He then proceeded to explain different types of energy, namely kinetic, potential, and mechanical energy. As he was teaching the slides he gave several sample problems and explained the bouncing ball experiment from the beginning of the lesson. Afterward, he talked about the basic properties of a collision, such as conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, but not necessarily conservation of kinetic energy. It was a great success!
Screenshots:
Volunteers: Andy Chen (1.5 hrs), Aditya Verma (1.5 hrs), Brian Song (1 hr)