Snacks

Nedanstående är från originalversionen av Snacks från Exploratorium. Snacks-hemsidan finns på adressen

http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/index.html

So what's a Science Snack?

Since the museum opened in 1969, teachers from the San Francisco Bay Area have brought their classes on field trips to the Exploratorium. When we began putting this book together, we decided to do just the opposite: We wanted to take the exhibits to the kids.

For three years, nearly one hundred teachers worked with staff members to create scaled-down versions of Exploratorium exhibits. The results were dozens of exciting "Snacks" --- miniature science exhibits that teachers could make using common, inexpensive, easily available materials. By using Snacks in their classrooms, teachers can climb out of the textbooks and join their students in discovering science for themselves.

What's in a Snack?

Snacks are divided into easy-to-follow sections that include instructions, advice, and helpful hints.

Each Snack begins with a photograph of itself, a short introduction and a list of the materials needed. Other sections give assembly instructions, contain descriptions of how to use the completed exhibits, and explain the science behind them. Most of the Snacks can be completed by one person. If a partner or adult help is needed, this is indicated. A section called "etc." offers interesting bits of additional scientific and historic information.

What can you do with a Snack?

The original collection of 107 Science Snacks was published in a single volume called the Exploratorium Science Snackbook and then republished in four separate volumes as the Science Snackbook Series. You can order any of the four books in the series (except for "The Magic Wand", which is out of print) from the Exploratorium Online Store.

Although the book was written for local high school science teachers, it wasn't long before we began to realize that Snacks were really getting around. Within a week of publication, for instance, we received a message from a teacher in the Australian Outback who needed help finding materials.

We heard from elementary school teachers and university professors. Art teachers were using Snacks, as were shop teachers and math teachers. Sixth-graders at one school were building their own miniature science museum. At another school, an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher found that building Snacks helped her students interact more: The ones who understood science best were helping those more adept at building things, and all were getting better at communicating with each other.

It wasn't just teachers who found Snacks useful: Children were bringing Snacks home to their families. Scouts were using Snacks to help get science merit badges; Snacks were making appearances at science fairs, birthday parties, and impromptu "magic" shows.

Try it for yourself!

Until now, Science Snacks were available only to teachers. These pages now make Science Snacks available to anyone interested in learning about science or helping others learn about science. Try it for yourself! You might be delighted to find how well hands-on discovery works.

Follow instructions closely! The experiments in The Exploratorium Snacks Online were designed with safety and success in mind. But even the simplest activity or the most common materials can be harmful when mishandled or misused. Use common sense whenever you're exploring or experimenting.

Technical documentation of the Swedish version of Snacks

The implementation of Snacks by the Swedish Resource Center for Physics Teaching has the following features:

Coded in VBScript (Active Server Pages, ASP) running IIS 5 on a Windows 2000 Server.
Text and figure names are stored in an Access database. This means that any text fragment is only stored on one place and the the layout (produced by ASP code) is very consistent.
Snack lists and displays are automatically produced from the data in the database.
A logged-in user can do the following via a web interface:
- Modify snacks with the help of a form containing text and filenames.
- Create new snacks.
- Delete snacks.
- Change application settings and layout.
- Individual snacks can be activated or hidden (for instance while work is in progress)
'Snack of the week' is automatically activated with a script that runs on the server at 0005 each Wednesday morning. The Snack of the week is automatically advertized on our home page http://www.fysik.org.
There is a facility for any user to enter comments to the snacks. A Snacks editor is notified by e-mail of any comment and he/she can edit the comments and add his/her own comments.
Credit to the Exploratorium is displayed at the bottom of each page.