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Wave Mobile

Use this simple-to-make rotational wave demonstrator to observe potential and kinetic energy transfers as wave energy is transferred from one end to the other.

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Making Waves Students will gain a physical sense of the relationship between energy and wavelength as they generate waves by shaking a rope or string.

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Magic Pendulum

This "magic" trick is an entertaining way to introduce the concept of resonance.

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Finger-Phone

Create a musical instrument in minutes to explore the science of sound production!

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Caterpillar Crawl

A piece of chenille stem creeps along a track, moved by vibrations and friction.

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Buzz Off

Give this little noisemaker a whirl to learn about the effects of air passing over a taut rubber band. As it vibrates, the rubber band can generate a surprising range of deep rumbling tones. How can the pitch be changed? Experiment to find the answer!

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Back in the Groove

This is a great activity for investigating sound. It might just be a history lesson about records for your students; and you can tell them, "No, this will not work with CDs."

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Animated Flip Books

This fun activity will give students the opportunity to create basic animations that can help them understand how motion pictures and the human eye work.

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2-Tubaphones

Make an instrument with an adjustable pitch to explore the science of sound waves and the art of music!

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The Everyday Science of Sound

Sound and music are important parts of our everyday sensory experience. In this lesson, students will conduct a series of demonstrations that illustrate the science behind how sound is made and heard.
Download activity

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Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds resemble waves breaking in the ocean. These clouds are formed between two layers of air with different densities and traveling at different speeds. If a warm, less dense layer of air exists over a layer of colder, denser air, and the wind shear across the two layers is strong enough, eddies will develop along the boundary. Evaporation and condensation of the eddies render them visible as wave shaped clouds.

The cloud is named after Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz who studied the dynamics of two fluids of different densities when a small disturbance, such as a wave, was introduced at the boundary connecting the fluids. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability occurs not only in clouds but also in the ocean, Saturn's bands, Jupiter's Red Spot, and the sun's corona.
Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit
Also see:

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Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds resemble waves breaking in the ocean. These clouds are formed between two layers of air with different densities and traveling at different speeds. If a warm, less dense layer of air exists over a layer of colder, denser air, and the wind shear across the two layers is strong enough, eddies will develop along the boundary.

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All about waves

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Wave on a string

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Explore the wonderful world of waves! Even observe a string vibrate in slow motion. Wiggle the end of the string and make waves, or adjust the frequency and amplitude of an oscillator.

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Waves, pendulum

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Amazing Pendulum Effect! Add me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brusspup/158773774166995 (Click the like button on facebook to add me) Be sure to watch the entire video to see all of the patterns that are created. At the end of the video there are 2 links to watch 2 more versions of the video.

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Sound waves, patterns

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water, sound waves

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Water Waves

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Many scientific phenomena are demonstrated to children through experiments using common, everyday ingredients. Teaching science to kids through safe experimentation helps children increase their interest in the subject, as well as the likelihood they will retain the information being taught. Two simple ingredients that can be used to execute a broad range of visually exciting experiments are water and food coloring.

Plants also Drink Water

Allow kids to literally watch how a plant takes in water with a piece of celery placed in a cup of colored water. For one cup of water, 10 drops of red or blue food coloring are added. Over the course of the following two days, the colored water will visibly creep up through the capillaries of the celery. This process is called transpiration, and it provides an opportunity to talk to kids about how plants take in water from the soil and how the capillaries help distribute the water throughout the plant. Chopping the stalk into thin slices will further demonstrate the paths of the capillaries.

Oil and Water Do Not Mix

Adding food coloring to this familiar experiment, makes the repellent movement of oil against water visual. After filling a tall glass with cold water, it is topped with about an inch of colored cooking oil. When stirring, children will see the streams and globs of colored oil as they disperse through the water without dissolving. Once stirring has stopped, all the colored oil particles will rise back to the top of the glass. This provides an opportunity to talk to children about the molecular differences between oil and water that prevent them from integrating when stirred.

Liquid Motion

Adding a few drops of food coloring to a bowl of water, then stirring, will immediately help children visualize the way water moves when it is circulating. A glass bowl is the best container to use, so everyone can see the full effect. The water is stirred rapidly in a spinning motion to get it moving. After the food coloring is added to the center, kids can watch the thin, spiraling strings of food coloring enter the water. This is an opportunity to talk to them about Brownian motion, which deals with the movement of particles suspended in liquid or gas. The food coloring will appear to move slower and will tend to sink once the motion subsides. The density difference between water and food coloring that causes this sinking provides further opportunity for discussion.

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Water & Food Coloring Experiments | Synonym

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Many scientific phenomena are demonstrated to children through experiments using common, everyday ingredients. Teaching science to kids through safe experimentation helps children increase their interest in the subject, as well as the likelihood they will retain the information being taught.

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Water waves

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Science Activity

Background
Many children hold misconceptions about the nature of water waves. One common misconception is that waves are generated from within the water. Although that may appear to be true, most waves -- and certainly the waves most children see -- are actually generated by wind. As wind travels across the water's surface, it pushes against the water and energy in the wind is absorbed by the water.

Another common misconception is that as a wave moves the water itself moves with the wave. In fact, a wave is the movement of energy through water. The water moves up and down, but not sideways in the direction of the wave's motion. The energy from wind moves in the direction of the wind. The energy moves from water molecule to water molecule, making each molecule move in a small circle. When one molecule bangs into its neighboring molecule, energy transfers to that neighboring molecule.

The most effective way to help children replace a misconception is to give them an experience that directly challenges it. In this simple set of activities children use wind to create waves and use marbles to model energy moving through water.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

1 large, flat pan, about 4 or 5 inches deep, for each group (dishpans or larger)

1 electric table fan or paper fan for each group

buckets or jugs for filling the pans with water

food dye (optional)

5 large marbles or ball bearings for each group

WHAT TO DO

1. Ask the class what causes waves. Discuss their ideas.

2. Put the pans on tables and fill each pan with 2-3 inches of water.

3. Divide students into as many groups as you have pans and put each group around a pan.

4. About 1 foot from each pan (on a narrow side), place an electric fan or have a student hold a paper fan facing the pan.

5. Ask students to predict what will happen when the fan blows across the water's surface. After students have made predictions, let each fan blow at a low speed.

6. Have students report the results. Were there waves? Did the water bunch up at the far end of the pan? Did the water slosh out of the pan? Then speed up the fans and have students report again. Make sure students don't run fans so quickly that water sloshes out of the pans. (It might slosh out with the fan at high speed because the energy in the waves can't transfer into the pan's wall readily.)

7. Discuss with the class the connection between the wind and the waves. Ask students to guess why the water didn't bunch up at the far end of each pan.

8. Give each group a set of 5 marbles. Have students place 4 of the marbles on a table, lined up in a row with each marble touching its neighbors. Ask students to predict what will happen if the fifth marble is gently rolled at the marble at one end of the row. After students have made predictions, have one student in each group roll the fifth marble. The marble at the far end of the row will roll away and the others will not move. Have students repeat the experiment several times.

9. Discuss the idea that the energy in the rolling marble went into the marble it hit, and from that marble to the next, until the energy reached the last marble. The energy made that marble roll away. Wave energy moves through water the same way.

10. Bring the students together for a wrap-up discussion. Ask them what causes waves. Discuss their answers, relating the answers to the wave experiment. Ask them if water moves sideways inside a wave, or if the water stays in one place while the wave moves through it. Discuss the answers, relating the answers to the wave experiment and to the marble experiment.

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Copyright © 1997 Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.

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Background Many children hold misconceptions about the nature of water waves. One common misconception is that waves are generated from within the water. Although that may appear to be true, most waves -- and certainly the waves most children see -- are actually generated by wind.

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Website on Sound resources

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Mix 1 cup of cornstarch and 1 cup of water in a bowl. Stir until you have the consistency of pancake batter. Put your hands in the mixture and move them around. The more you try to move it, the thicker and more solid it feels.

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Have students record their voice on a recording like garage band that visualizes their sound as a waveform.

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how to make the oobleck dance

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How to Perform the Corn Starch and Speaker Experiment

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Non-Newtonian fluids exhibit the qualities of both a liquid and a solid. Cornstarch, a thickening agent derived from corn, becomes a non-Newtonian liquid when mixed with water. Several experiments serve to illustrate the strange effects of stress on these types of fluids, among them the cornstarch and speaker cone experiment.

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Book from Amazon

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Products on sound

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Strike up the band and demonstrate resonance, interference, pitch, and harmonics with these fun products. Appropriate for both instructional purposes or as part of a larger marching ensemble! Insightful, fun and sometimes loud; rhythm not included! When tossed in the air, Buzzing Stunt Magnets produce a clattering sound, much like a Cicada or high voltage sparking.

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Using sound waves to make oobleck dance

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Using sound waves to make patterns

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Simple Science Tricks With Household Items

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Sound waves and forks

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News, email and search are just the beginning. Discover more every day. Find your yodel.

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Sound waves and straws

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The beveled "lips" you cut into the squashed end of the straw act as a reed for your instrument.

When you blow into the reed and get it vibrating, you send pulses of compressed air down the straw, causing the air in the tube to start vibrating, too. Affected by the length of the tube, this vibrating air in turn affects the reed's vibrations. When the reed vibrates at just the right frequency, the air in the straw vibrates powerfully, and you hear a loud, buzzing note, sort of like an oboe.

When you blow through the straw, there is a high pressure in your mouth. As air rushes through the straw, the pressure in the straw drops. The high pressure outside the straw pushes the sides of the reed inward, closing off the flow. The pressure then builds inside the straw and pops the reed open again.

The sound from your straw oboe is an example of a phenomenon called resonance. Every object has a natural frequency, a tendency to vibrate at a particular rate. When you vibrate something at its natural frequency, it resonates, meaning that the vibrations build and grow more and more extreme. Other examples of resonance include a car that shudders at certain speeds, a child swinging higher and higher on a swing, and a glass shattered by the high notes of a soprano.

The straw oboe resonates when the sound waves bouncing back and forth inside make a special pattern called a standing wave. Standing waves occur when waves going one way overlap with waves going the opposite way, creating a set of peaks and valleys that seem to stand still. You can't see the standing waves in your straw, but you can hear them.

The exact note that you hear when you blow your straw oboe depends on the length of the straw. In a shorter straw, the standing wave inside the straw will be shorter, too, causing the pitch to be higher. In a longer straw, the standing wave will be longer, and the note you hear will be lower.

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The beveled "lips" you cut into the squashed end of the straw act as a reed for your instrument. When you blow into the reed and get it vibrating, you send pulses of compressed air down the straw, causing the air in the tube to start vibrating, too.

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Can soundwaves determine the size of oil droplets in the sea?

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Researchers Paul Panetta and Carl Friedrichs of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) compared the performance of acoustic and optical instruments using this oil slick in the Ohmsett wave tank. Credit: Photo by Paul Panetta.

Two years ago this week, oil began streaming from the seafloor into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform. All told, the disaster cost 11 lives, released 4.9 million barrels of crude oil, and caused still unspecified impacts to marine life and the Gulf economy.

Now, a pair of researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science is using a 1-year, $350,000 contract from the U.S. Department of the Interior to test whether sound waves can be used to determine the size of oil droplets in the subsea-knowledge that could help guide the use of chemical dispersants during the cleanup of future spills. The effort is also supported by the VIMS-Industry Partnership.

Chemical dispersants have conventionally been applied to surface oil slicks to produce smaller droplets that can more easily be mixed downward by ocean turbulence. Dispersal through a larger water volume lessens the immediate threat to the shoreline and to organisms such as seabirds, marine mammals, and turtles. Dispersion also increases the surface area available for bacterial decay.

During the Deepwater event, however, the oil industry for the first time released dispersants directly into a deep-sea blowout. Indeed, of the 1.84 million gallons of dispersants used during the spill, 42%-771,000 gallons-was applied at the wellhead, 5,067 feet below the surface. The idea was to reduce both the amount of oil reaching the surface and the amount of dispersants that needed to be applied.

Today, the effectiveness and safety of this deep-sea dispersant application remains unknown, at least in part because of the difficulty of monitoring the size of the oil droplets within the subsea plume. That's where the VIMS research comes in.

Project leader Paul Panetta, a scientist with Applied Research Associates, Inc., and an adjunct professor at VIMS, says "To maximize biodegradation, dispersants are designed to produce oil droplets that are less than 100 microns across. But there are currently no tools available to monitor droplet size in deep subsea blowouts. Our goal is to develop acoustic techniques for that purpose, giving spill responders a means to gauge the effectiveness of the dispersants and how much they should use."

Tools do exist to measure droplet size within dispersed oil slicks at and just below the sea surface-including ultraviolet fluorometers and LISSTs (for Laser In-Situ Scattering and Transmissometers). But these optical devices are poorly suited for use within highly opaque plumes of oil.

Acoustic instruments and techniques offer a promising alternative.

"There's a reason that many marine mammals use sound rather than sight for long-distance communications," says team member Carl Friedrichs, Chair of Physcial Sciences and head of the Coastal Hydrodynamics and Sediment Dynamics lab at VIMS. "Light can't go nearly as far in water-let alone turbid water-as compared to sound waves." Friedrichs notes that acoustic instruments also tend to be less delicate than their optical counterparts, and are better able to withstand "biofouling" and the high pressures of the deep sea.
Experiments
Panetta and Friedrichs conducted the first experiments for the project in December 2011 at the Ohmsett Wave Tank in Leonardo, New Jersey, which serves as the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility for the U.S. Department of the Interior. This 2.6-million gallon concrete basin-one of the largest wave tanks in the world-measures 666 feet long by 65 feet wide by 11 feet deep. It features an immense piston for generating waves up to 3 feet high, an oil distribution and recovery system, and a motorized bridge for deploying instruments.

During their Ohmsett tests, Panetta and Friedrichs compared the performance of optical and acoustic instruments borrowed from their labs at VIMS, transmitting, receiving, and interpreting sound waves and light as they reflected against an aqueous slurry of 20 parts of oil to 1 part dispersant.

In a second experiment at VIMS, the pair performed a similar experiment but on a much smaller-and simpler-scale. This time they compared the performance of their optical and acoustical instruments in a small bucket, adding dispersants to the same crude oil used at Ohmsett and creating turbulence with a drill-powered paint mixer.

They recently conducted a third test in Norway, in a tank operated by SINTEF, the largest independent research organization in Scandinavia. This "tower tank"-specifically created for studying subsurface releases of oil-measures 21 feet tall by 9 feet wide and allows room for various instruments including video cameras, a LISST, and, in this case, the acoustic equipment supplied by the VIMS team.
Preliminary results are promising
In all three cases, the team's preliminary results qualitatively confirm the potential superiority of an acoustic approach to monitoring oil dispersion. "Our tests showed that acoustic techniques were effective at penetrating the plume," says Panetta, "whereas the LISST would have been ineffective. Our initial measurements indicate the acoustic measurements can track the droplet size for a subsurface release of oil."

The next step, says Panetta, is to "take these data and turn them into a measurement method that would tell us exactly what the droplet size is. That would be valuable to the people spraying the dispersants, and valuable to the people modeling the fate of the oil, because during the cleanup of an oil spill, the size of the oil droplets affects everything."

Panetta and Friedrichs say their ultimate goal is to partner with the private sector so that commercial sonar manufacturers can adapt the new technology to their existing instruments for use by the oil and gas industry. "That's the longer term technology plan," says Panetta, "but we obviously have to first figure out the science behind it to make it work. We have to solve the physics problem-to figure out which signals to analyze and how to interpret them so we can get a quantitative measure of the oil-droplet size."

Source: Virginia Institute of Marine Science

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Acoustics could guide dispersant use during subsea oil spills

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Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are investigating whether sound waves can be used to determine the size of oil droplets in the subsea-knowledge that could help guide the use of chemical dispersants during the cleanup of future spills.

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Sound and Light | The Sound and Light unit provides students with an understanding of sound and light waves through the theme of the "Sunken Treasure," a continuous story line throughout the lessons.

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Sound

Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments. Through three lessons, students come to better understand sound waves.