At first, I wanted to call this blog post “behind the scenes of a school lab” until I looked through the pictures and realized that all I am showing is people sitting around my desk in my office! Actually, not only sitting — test-running all the experiments for our energie:labor!

First, here is Julian’s experiment on atmospheric CO2.

And here an experiment from Jonas’ station on the role of the ocean in the climate system. A candle below an air-filled balloon. Can you imagine what will happen next?

Yes, this.

Sorry about the jump in perspective — even though I knew what would happen I clearly didn’t expect it enough to hold the camera stable. Small consolidation that everybody else clearly jumped, too?

Anyway, the point of that experiment is to look at the heat capacity of air and water. I’ve written about this before, see here (where we also have pictures of bursting the water-filled balloon because this is how we roll. But only in the lecture theatre, not in my office… ;-)).

Below, we are looking at Jonas’ overturning experiment, apparently discussing the work sheets. It’s really great how well this team works together on developing all their materials, even though their personal styles span the whole spectrum of teaching styles!

But we were also having fun, or at least that’s what it looks like… ;-)

In the picture below, taken on the second day of our dry run a couple of days later, we are looking at Henning’s station on the ice-albedo-feedback. As Henning is sitting next to me and we are sitting around my desk, he’s unfortunately not even in the picture!

In the background of the picture above you see the next exciting station that Nicolas prepared (and big shout out to my office mate who didn’t beat an eye when she came in and the office was filled with all our equipment and smelled of vinegar and white spirit…

What the guys are doing on the picture below? Using a bike pump to increase the pressure inside that bottle to make a cloud in a bottle.

Worked really well!

And then, there comes the most sophisticated piece of equipment of the whole lab: Nicolas’ cloud chamber. I’ll only tell you this much for now: It’s awesome! And you should stay tuned for an upcoming publication on how to build it and how to use it in teaching. Because it’s that great!

Now I’m out of pictures, but there is one last thing I want to say: Thank you, team, you are awesome! :-)