Make a Boat powered on Renewable Energy
Using small photovoltaic cells participants will create their own solar boats.
Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Monday, April 2, 2007
Journey of Droplet Game
This game illustrates the journey of a droplet of water in nature and by so doing participants can collect beads to create their own colorful bracelet that represents their own journey of their droplet.
Composting Activity
Participants create their own mini compost in a bottle of water and can take it back home and use the compost as organic manure.
Ecological Footprint
Participants get to try and create their own farm based on two diets a vegetarian one and a meat based one and get to see which one has more ecological impact on the environment.
What is a Greenhouse and the Greenhouse Effect?
Students will learn how greenhouses manage to retain heat, and will experiment with different media to try and figure out which will trap the most.
Background
Greenhouses are used extensively by botanists, commercial plant growers, and dedicated gardeners. Particularly in cool climates, greenhouses are useful for growing and propagating plants because they both allow sunlight to enter and prevent heat from escaping. The transparent covering of the greenhouse allows visible light to enter unhindered, where it warms the interior as it is absorbed by the material within. The transparent covering also prevents the heat from leaving by reflecting the energy back into the interior and preventing outside winds from carrying it away.
Like the greenhouse covering, our atmosphere also serves to retain heat at the surface of the earth. Much of the sun's energy reaches earth as visible light. Of the visible light that enters the atmosphere, about 30% is reflected back out into space by clouds, snow and ice-covered land, sea surfaces, and atmospheric dust. The rest is absorbed by the liquids, solids, and gases that constitute our planet. The energy absorbed is eventually reemitted, but not as visible light (only very hot objects such as the sun can emit visible light). Instead, it's emitted as longer-wavelength light called infrared radiation. This is also called "heat" radiation, because although we cannot see in infrared, we can feel its presence as heat. This is what you feel when you put your hand near the surface of a hot skillet. Certain gases in our atmosphere (known as "trace" gases because they make up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere) can absorb this outgoing infrared radiation, in effect trapping the heat energy. This trapped heat energy makes the earth warmer than it would be without these trace gases.
The ability of certain trace gases to be relatively transparent to incoming visible light from the sun yet opaque to the energy radiated from earth is one of the best-understood processes in atmospheric science. This phenomenon has been called the "greenhouse effect" because the trace gases trap heat similar to the way that a greenhouse's transparent covering traps heat. Without our atmospheric greenhouse effect, earth's surface temperature would be far below freezing. On the other hand, an increase in atmospheric trace gases could result in increased trapped heat and rising global temperatures.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Hands-on Environmental Experiments
Young and old alike will be able to conduct several hands-on experiments facilitated by Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) and learn about a variety of topics. Below is a list of the activities that will take place during World Environment Day
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