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Sound waves, encoded information, transmission and amplification of sound- all while designing a simple record player

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This activity requires two people: one to rotate the turntable and one to hold the needle arm and sound cone.

To set up the turntable, hold the pencil-and-record assembly on a tabletop, point-side down, like a spinning top (the pencil will act as the axle of your spinning top). Make sure the record stays as horizontal as possible. G ently twirl the pencil, turning the record clockwise. See if you can spin the record at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute (RPM)-good luck!

To set up the needle arm, grasp the wider end of the sound cone and bring the pointed end of the cone (with the pin hanging down) close to the record. Orient the needle arm so the pin is parallel to the groove and the cone lies tangent to the record. (To get a consistent sound, the pin needs to rest comfortably in the groove as the record rotates beneath it. Click to enlarge the image below.)

When you're ready, slowly lower the pin so that it rests in a groove of the spinning record. Gently hold just the top of the cone and let the weight of the cone be supported by the pin, allowing it to move with the motion of the spinning record.

Listen to what comes out of the open end of the paper cone. It should be music to your ears!

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This activity requires two people: one to rotate the turntable and one to hold the needle arm and sound cone. To set up the turntable, hold the pencil-and-record assembly on a tabletop, point-side down, like a spinning top (the pencil will act as the axle of your spinning top).

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requency and pitch are studied as students create head harp instruments wtih string

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Wrap a string around your head and pluck it to play music.

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Explanation of what an earthquake is- reads text to student- highlighted vocab

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Unlike the on our bodies, though, this on the Earth is not all in one piece. Instead, it consists of many pieces that fit together a bit like a jigsaw .

Scientists call these pieces plates. plates differ from jigsaw pieces in that they constantly but slowly move around, sliding past and/or bumping into one another.

The edges of the plates are called boundaries. The rough boundaries occasionally get stuck, but the rest of the plates keep moving.

When a moves far enough, its edges break free along an area called a . When two plates slip past one another , the people who live in the area close to the experience an earthquake .

The spot on the of the Earth directly above where the earthquake occurs underground is called the of the earthquake . After an earthquake , there are often smaller earthquakes - called aftershocks - that occur in the same place. These aftershocks have been known to continue for weeks, months, and even years after the main earthquake .

Earthquakes can be very destructive. The sudden motion of plates can cause injuries and serious property damage, especially because there is often little or no advance warning of earthquakes.

When boundaries become stuck, their usual energy from motion is stored and builds up until, during an earthquake , it is released in the form of waves that radiate outward from a in all directions. As these waves reach the of the Earth, they shake the ground and everything on it.

If you ever experience an earthquake firsthand, it's important to remember and follow a few safety tips:

Get low and take cover under a protective object, such as a sturdy table or desk.

Hold on and try to stay as steady as possible.

Stay inside until the earthquake ends.

Stay away from windows, furniture, and other items that could fall on you.

If you're in bed, stay there and protect your head with your pillow.

If you're outside, move to a clear spot away from buildings, trees, and power lines.

If you're in a car, slow down and stop in a clear area until the earthquake stops.

Take earthquake safety seriously! Scientists estimate that there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year. Of these, approximately 100,000 of them can be felt, and at least 100 of them cause some kind of damage.

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Unlike the on our bodies, though, this on the Earth is not all in one piece. Instead, it consists of many pieces that fit together a bit like a jigsaw . Scientists call these pieces plates. plates differ from jigsaw pieces in that they constantly but slowly move around, sliding past and/or bumping into one another.

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Visuals, activities, and resources about plant cells

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Lots of questions about magnets answered with texts, graphics, and video

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Great explanation and graphics to go along with lesson about color and the sky

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The sun produces white light, which is made up of light of all colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

Light is a wave, and each of these colors corresponds to a different frequency and therefore a different wavelength of light.

The colors in the rainbow spectrum are arranged according to their frequencies: Violet and blue light have higher frequencies than yellow, orange, and red light.

When the white light from the sun shines through the earth's atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules. These molecules scatter the light. The shorter the wavelength of the light, the more it is scattered by the atmosphere. Because its wavelength is so much shorter, blue light is scattered approximately ten times more than red light.

In addition, the frequency of blue light, compared to red light, is closer to the resonant frequency of the atoms and molecules that make up the air. That is, if the electrons bound to molecules in the air are pushed, they will oscillate with a natural frequency that is even higher than the frequency of blue light. Blue light pushes on the electrons with a frequency that is close to their natural resonant frequency, which causes the blue light to be re-radiated out in all directions in a process called scattering. The red light that is not scattered continues on in its original direction. When you look up in the sky, the scattered blue light is the light that you see.

Why does the setting sun look reddish orange? When the sun is on the horizon, its light takes a longer path through the atmosphere to your eyes than when the sun is directly overhead. By the time the light of the setting sun reaches your eyes, most of the colors of light have been scattered out. The light you finally see is reddish orange.

Violet light has an even shorter wavelength than blue light: It scatters even more than blue light does. So why isn't the sky violet? Because there's just not enough of it. The sun puts out much more blue light than violet light, so most of the scattered light in the sky is blue.

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The sun produces white light, which is made up of light of all colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Light is a wave, and each of these colors corresponds to a different frequency and therefore a different wavelength of light.

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Great overview for students about planets outside our solar system

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All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars are called exoplanets. Exoplanets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit.

So, astronomers use other ways to detect and study these distant planets. They search for exoplanets by looking at the effects these planets have on the stars they orbit.

How do we look for exoplanets?

One way to search for exoplanets is to look for " wobbly" stars. A star that has planets doesn't orbit perfectly around its center. From far away, this off-center orbit makes the star look like it's wobbling.

Hundreds of planets have been discovered using this method. However, only big planets-like Jupiter, or even larger-can be seen this way. Smaller Earth-like planets are much harder to find because they create only small wobbles that are hard to detect.

How can we find Earth-like planets in other solar systems?

In 2009, NASA launched a spacecraft called Kepler to look for exoplanets. Kepler looked for planets in a wide range of sizes and orbits. And these planets orbited around stars that varied in size and temperature.

Some of the planets discovered by Kepler are rocky planets that are at a very special distance from their star. This sweet spot is called the habitable zone, where life might be possible.

Kepler detected exoplanets using something called the transit method. When a planet passes in front of its star, it's called a transit. As the planet transits in front of the star, it blocks out a little bit of the star's light. That means a star will look a little less bright when the planet passes in front of it.

Astronomers can observe how the brightness of the star changes during a transit. This can help them figure out the size of the planet.

By studying the time between transits, astronomers can also find out how far away the planet is from its star. This tells us something about the planet's temperature. If a planet is just the right temperature, it could contain liquid water-an important ingredient for life.

So far, thousands of planets have been discovered by the Kepler mission. And more will be found by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, which is observing the entire sky to locate planets orbiting the nearest and brightest stars.

We now know that exoplanets are very common in the universe. And future NASA missions have been planned to discover many more!

Want to learn even more about exoplanets?

Visit NASA Exoplanets 101.

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All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars are called exoplanets. Exoplanets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit. So, astronomers use other ways to detect and study these distant planets.

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Artistic representations of exoplanets

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The classic satellite shot of the Earth from space is shown with the shadow of night as if it were orbiting the sun. Use this image to contrast with exoplanets, and note that Earth is not tidally locked due to the regular shadow making its way around the entire Earth due our rotation around our axis.

For SOSx use Blue Marble - Seasonal.

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Book a Flight to Another Solar System - Science On a Sphere

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Although these exoplanets have only been detected as blips of shadow across faraway stars, artists have worked with scientists to imagine what these far-away planets might look like.

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Hands on project that allows students to interact with sound waves- building a funnel for sound waves

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Hear tiny sounds with a Super Sound Cone!

What you need:

A big piece of tag board or poster board, about 18 x 24 inches

Transparent tape

What to do:

This is so easy!

Just roll the poster board into a cone shape, leaving a small hole (about 1/2 to 1 inch across) at the pointed end. Leave the big end as wide as you can. Then tape the edge into position.

Take your cone outside. Put the small end in your ear. Point the cone in different directions and listen carefully. Notice how different the world sounds with and without the cone to aid your hearing.

What tiny sounds did you notice with the cone that you didn't notice before?

The cone is a funnel for waves

Like waves in the ocean, sound makes waves in the air. Air jostles back and forth as the sound energy waves pass.

If you put something like paper in the path of the sound wave, it will also vibrate quite a lot. If you give this paper surface the right shape, the sound waves will be funneled to a point. So your super sound cone is a sound funnel!

The same sort of idea makes NASA's giant dish antennas work. These antennas listen for signals from the planetary spacecraft now exploring space far from Earth.

We can't just build a spacecraft, tell it to phone home once in a while, then launch it to Mars or Jupiter! We must have a way to hear its tiny voice and talk to it when it is very far away.

Some of the Deep Space Network antennas are twice as big as the one watching over the sheep above!

Of course, no spacecraft actually communicates by sound. Messages wouldn't get very far, since sound waves can't travel in the vacuum of space! But the spacecraft do send out radio waves, which can travel practically forever. The trouble is, the radio waves spread out and get weaker and weaker the farther they travel.

So NASA's radio wave "ears" must be very big indeed!

These dish antennas don't look much like your sound cone, do they? But the path the radio signals take once they hit the dish is like a folded up cone. Once the signal hits the focus (like the small end of your cone), electronic instruments take over to turn up the volume even more.

Then we can begin to decode the message and figure out what the spacecraft has to show and tell us!

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Hear tiny sounds with a Super Sound Cone!

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Hear tiny sounds with a Super Sound Cone! A big piece of tag board or poster board, about 18 x 24 inches Transparent tape This is so easy! Just roll the poster board into a cone shape, leaving a small hole (about 1/2 to 1 inch across) at the pointed end.

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A look at raw binary data before and after encoded

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The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this:
. . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . .
How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?

Spacecraft engineers and computer scientists have had to solve many big problems. But none of these problems could be tackled without one thing: a special language so people could communicate with machines. That language makes . . .

Spacecraft seem very smart.

The huge dish antennas that pick out the spacecraft's signal from millions of miles away seem very smart.

The computers that decode and process the signals into pictures seem very smart.

But none of these machines can learn English, or Spanish, or any other human language the way people can. These machines understand only two ideas:

So the big question is.

How do we feed complicated information IN and get complicated information OUT, if we can only say "ON" and "OFF"?

Let's find out!

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What's the secret code for talking to spacecraft?

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The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this: . . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . . How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?

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Halloween type science about space and exoplanets

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Game that reinforces knowledge of cell structure and function

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Plant Cell - Game - Science - Sheppard Software

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Plant Cell Game - learn about the fascinating organelles in a plant cell.

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Game that reinforces the structure and function of a cell

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Animal Cell Game - Science - Sheppard Software

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Learn about the different organelles in an animal cell! Colorful animations make this game as fun as it is educational

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Frequency and shape of a wave

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Unit 8.2 L5 Hitting the High Notes - OpenSciEd

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Amplitude and shape of a wave

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Unit 8.2 L4 Sound – Turn it Up! - OpenSciEd

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Play wit the effects of mass and the orbits in solar system

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Welcome to My Solar System. It has 2 interactive screens that you can explore. Choose a screen to start exploring.

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See how mass effects the gravitational pull

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Move the sun, earth, moon and space station to see how it affects their gravitational forces and orbital paths. Visualize the sizes and distances between different heavenly bodies, and turn off gravity to see what would happen without it!

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Simulation of plate movement with explanations- excellent visuals

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Mechanisms of Plate Movement | PBS LearningMedia

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Explore the different types of tectonic plate boundaries in this media gallery that includes an interactive and animations of plate processes from NOVA. Use this resource to model and visualize how movements of Earth’s crust result in geologic processes and features on Earth’s surface.

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Interactive Slides that deal with the predictable nature of the Earth Sun Moon System

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The sun, Earth, and moon are in constant motion. The movements of these three giant spheres have an enormous influence on life here on Earth, so it’s a good idea to understand the ways in which our planet’s dance with its two most important neighbors shape our days, nights and seasons.

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Simulation creating waves of different pitch and amplitude

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Video about what sound is- how some noises are pleasant and some not- would enhance my sound unit and some reading that goes along with OPEN SCI ED- with well made video content

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Find lessons on Sound Waves for all grades. Free interactive resources and activities for the classroom and home.

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Chem Link interactive slides that show good graphics of different states of matter- particle models

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How can a magnet move something without touching it?

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How can a magnet move something without touching it?

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Model of a speaker and magnet system

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Magnetic Simulation OpenSciEd Science Curriculum

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This simulation allows student to investigate changing the strength of forces in a magnetic field.

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Several videos to use while teaching magnetism unit

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All of the videos associated with the OpenSciEd units can be found on our YouTube Channel and on this page. For classrooms that are not able to stream YouTube videos, we provide alternative links to the majority of our videos.