My dad keeps asking me about a claim I made in my post about the curvature of the Earth: That looking at sea level across a 500 m wide part of a lake, we should be missing the bottom 20 cm of ships moored on the other side. So to shut him up, here are […]
When you look at waves, do you sometimes notice the train of smaller waves being pushed forward by the “main” wave? That has always fascinated me. Kind of like in the center of this picture: When we were sailing in Ratzeburg earlier this year, one day there were hardly any wind waves on the lake, so putting a […]
A pier full of sail boats, perpendicular to the prevailing wave direction, and voila: Instant demonstration of an amplified wave! Look at how the masts show a transversal wave: Maybe consider bringing this video as a backup when you are not sure whether your class will be able to do this visualization of transversal waves and […]
Earlier this year at Forscherfreizeit Ratzeburg – the summer camp at which Conny, Siska, Martin, a bunch of teenagers and myself spent a week sailing, exploring and playing with water – I spent a good amount of time staring at waves hitting the wooden boards that form the slip in the port. They create a nice […]
The advantage of wind-less days on a sailing holiday is that you can play with water as much as you like. For example in order to look at the interference of waves, which is what I did. Check out the movie below! Sitting on the pier, playing, over time the interference pattern get more and more […]
A pet peeve of mine are books on handcrafts or experiments or any kind of activity that come with drawings instead of pictures, because I always suspect that it was easier to draw whatever the author wanted to show than to take a photo of it. Which, to me, suggests that it isn’t really all […]
I always love watching paddles in water, or ships in water, or ducks in water, or anything water, really, but on a wind-less day in Ratzeburg, Siska managed to create the beautiful eddies you see in the movie below, that survived well over half a minute out in the open lake! Beautiful.
In Ratzeburg, we very much enjoyed our daily early morning swims. One thing that is really nice to observe when you are swimming in a calm lake is how things vanish behind the horizon. Of course, you see the same effect when sitting on the beach or on a boat, but somehow it impresses me […]
Conny, Siska, Martin and myself just — we came back home only yesterday! — ran a summer camp for teenagers called “Forscherfreizeit Ratzeburg”. The idea was to combine a fun summer holiday experience at a beautiful lake with all kinds of opportunities for doing experiments as well going sailing, swimming, hiking, you name it. And we […]
Where do I even start??? A very helpful concept, which is completely contrary to how most people approach course planning, is “backward design”. Instead of looking at all the cool experiments, the awesome, fun materials, the best case studies, we first look at the learning outcomes we want to achieve with our course. From those […]
