[time-nuts] Anybody have suggestions for time related science fair projects?

[Philip Gladstone]

On 11/05/2018 07:23, jimlux wrote:
> On 5/10/18 9:55 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
>>
>> A few months ago, I was a judge for the county level middle school 
>> science
>> fair.  (I'm not very good at what they wanted, but that's a different
>> problem.)
>>
>> What sort of interesting time related experiments can a middle school 
>> geek do?
>>
>> Borrowing serious gear may not be off scale as long as a youngster 
>> can run it.
>>
>
> The whole area of celestial nav is time related and uses very simple 
> equipment -
>
> Telling time by measuring the sun in some way.  Occultation of stars 
> by the moon.  Positions of jupiter's big 4 moons.
>
> Pendulum experiments.  If the student has a way to change their 
> altitude, can they measure changes in g.  Driving a pendulum.
>
> Coupled resonators  (spring/mass, pendulum, vibrating rods)
>
> Measuring the speed of light (Fizeau or Michelson method? Other ways)
>
> Water clock, sand hour glass, etc.  Measuring performance variation 
> over environmental variations.
>
>
> the trick with good science projects is finding something that's not 
> just a "lab demo" - where there's some engineering component to 
> figuring out how to execute the demo with unusual or improvised 
> equipment, or where you're measuring something that's not been done 
> before.
The advice that we got when doing a middle school science project was 
that you wanted an experiment with only one variable (altitude or 
temperature etc) and a  measurement of a single variable (maybe over time).

Philip