It’s been another wonderful science-driven holiday season! We’ve experimented with balloons that blast-off, nearly unsinkable dinghies, delicious math candies, stackable liquids, desiccated dancers, split light, and put a minature Jaques Cousteau in a bottle. Tonight we’re going to give Hanukkah a fine send-off with another trick of the light. I got the idea for […]
Continue ReadingOf all the science experiments we’ve done for Hanukkah this year, and last year, this one is probably the easiest to set up and demonstrate. It also turns into a very satisfying toy. The Cartesian Diver (named after René Descartes) is not only easy to build and fun to play with, it also opens the […]
Continue ReadingIt’s the most wonderful time of the year – for science! If you haven’t been following along with my family this Hanukkah, you’ve got some catching up to do. We’ve already launched a rocket, sank a few boats, transformed math into a form of dessert, poured some stripes in a jar, and danced with the […]
Continue ReadingIt’s Hanukkah, and in my house that means it’s time to celebrate with science! Tonight, we poured some bubbly and drowned our…raisins. Well, we tried to drown them, but raisins are surprisingly good swimmers. In the video above, my five-year-old explains how “The Raisin Lifting Experiment” works, but even after the experiment was finished and […]
Continue ReadingThis year, as in years past, my family is celebrating Hanukkah with a series of science experiments. We launched under pressure on the first night of Hanukkah. On the second night, we triumphed over buoyancy. Last night, we ate mathematics for dessert. Tonight, we’re hosting a mixer. Or not. The Layered Liquids experiment has more […]
Continue ReadingUnconventional holiday traditions are fun for the whole family! So far this year, my family has celebrated Hanukkah by launching rockets indoors and constructing small boats in order to sink them. Today we’re delving deeper, into the very language of science. That’s right; it’s math time. Roger Bacon said, “Mathematics is the gate and key […]
Continue ReadingHanukkah is the festival of lights, and in my family, we celebrate with illuminating science experiments. Yesterday, we launched a balloon rocket, and today we’re sinking ships. Well, tin foil boats, actually, but this small experiment holds greater drama than you might expect. We thought it would be a simple to float and then sink […]
Continue ReadingEvery year, my family celebrates the eight days of Hanukkah with eight fun experiments. We’re at it again this year, starting with a balloon rocket experiment. It’s an easy, playful way to demonstrate Newton’s third law of motion. It’s also a good bridge to talking about air pressure, thrust, velocity, and a gateway to a […]
Continue ReadingProlific game designer and master of Kickstarter, Daniel Solis, is at it again with his latest project: Writer’s Dice. It’s a simple enough idea: a six-sided die with words imprinted on the sides. Toss the dice and get a word: …
Continue ReadingThe kids should see this, and so should the parents. “The Kid Should See This” is a very cool new site from Rion and her 3 year old co-curator. The site is populated with a steady stream of fun and …
Continue ReadingThe booths have been dismantled, the games put away, the green goblin face paint washed off, and the last of the trolls, pirates and grognards have been swept from the halls of the Indiana Convention Center. Gen Con may be …
Continue ReadingWith swim lessons over, summer camps a distant memory and the specter of school still several weeks distant, cries of “There’s nothing to do!” are becoming more and more frequent. We, at Geekdad, sympathize — that’s why we’ve come up …
Continue ReadingAs summer revs up into full swing, many of us are taking family vacations. Lots of families chose to go camping. Tents, smores, pine trees swaying in the breeze, ghost stories around the campfire… what’s not to love? Well, apparently a lot. A new business venture recently caught my eye and I was more than a […]
Continue ReadingThe muse has hit me like a vorpal sword. I’ve been working on some poems for an upcoming comedy performance and it was impossible to resist the temptation to …
Continue ReadingTake the CDC Flu App Challenge The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC to their close friends) is looking for a few good apps, and they want you to make them. The CDC Flu App Challenge is open …
Continue ReadingSome kids idolize athletes, others idolize screen stars. Mine idolizes people like Jan Vormann, who goes nowhere without his bag of LEGO bricks. Vormann has traveled to cities like Tel Aviv, Barcelona, and New York where he uses LEGO bricks to fill in crumbling architecture as part of his dispatchwork project. Some of his […]
Continue Reading“Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences. …Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world.” –Roger Bacon Math is one of those quintessentially geeky things that are often taught so badly that even some of […]
Continue ReadingImage via Wikipedia Paleontologists recently unearthed bones, likely in Montana or Wyoming, of a new dinosaur species dubbed Stochastisaurus. “Based on surrounding species and the fossils themselves, there’s an approximately 88% chance that Stochastisaurus was an herbivore,” says the lead …
Continue ReadingNobody will ever mistake me for Martha Stewart. I like it when my house is decorated for the holidays, but I’m really not very particular about just how it’s done. Which is how I ended up with a tree decorated entirely with LEGO bricks one year. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you […]
Continue ReadingOur family celebrates the holidays with science! For each night of Hanukkah, we do a different experiment. This year, we used two fabulous books for inspiration: The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists and The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science: 50 Experiments for Daring Young Scientists. The experiments we picked […]
Continue ReadingLast week while baking muffins with my son’s preschool class, I set fire to the school. Okay, technically I didn’t set it on fire—it was only butter smoke from the tin that set off the alarm, necessitating the entire school …
Continue ReadingEquations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond. But after I got geeky with an equation for Halloween candy, Geek Dads Jonathan Liu and John Booth hit me with an intriguing question: what about relating speed and …
Continue ReadingThe number of American political geeks under age eighteen is predictably low. I mean, why should kids geek out about something they can’t even participate in? The better question is: Why shouldn‘t they? Kids aren’t allowed to vote, but that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of understanding what’s going on around them. Besides, kids are natural […]
Continue ReadingThis week we had several days of high-wind warnings where we live. The forecasts were accurate and after the leaves had been stripped from the trees, the kids wanted to be outside having fun. They made the most of the …
Continue ReadingI’ve been a geek all my life, but I hated school. Until college, I learned more watching PBS and maxing out my youth library card every week than I ever did in a classroom. I’m worried that my son will have the same experience – he’s only four years old, but he already loves science […]
Continue ReadingThat was the question from my youngest son this weekend. Granted, it came after his request to go somewhere that we were not able to go; however, the question has been rattling ’round my brain since Saturday afternoon. The question …
Continue ReadingThe North Carolina Science Festival kicks off on September 11th. With hundreds of events scattered across the entire state, there’s something for everyone at the first of its kind festival. One event of particular interest to most GeekDad readers is …
Continue ReadingStretched before you is a 32″x48″ tabla rasa and a drawer of track pieces. The stakes are high. Success means hours of independent, uninterrupted, creative playtime, eventually resulting in your child’s acceptance to MIT. Failure to build is the surest …
Continue ReadingBored with moo, baaa, and oink? Here are some slightly more *exotic* noises guaranteed to thrill the playground and/or terrify your child into immediate behavioral correction. Some practice required.
Continue ReadingWhen I was a kid, I went though a period where I wanted to be a photographer. I believe it started when my parents gave me a camera that shot 110 film and was so small, it was almost a …
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