AYVA’s Field Trip to the Ontario Science Centre

Last week, AYVA had the pleasure of demonstrating some of PASCO’s newest wireless sensors for a group of science educators at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Together we were able to come up with some fun demonstrations to get kids interested in the wonders of science.

First, we used the force platform to observe the phenomenon of your weight temporarily decreasing when your heart beats. You can look at the data and see the downward spikes occurring every second or so but how do we know that it actually corresponds to your heart rate? At the Ontario Science Centre, they have a stethoscope attached to a microphone so that we could hear the heart beat and see the weight drop simultaneously.

Next the durability of the Wireless Accelerometer was tested. The first test was standing on a desk and dropping it to observe the sensors freefall, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy these innovative educators. Their next idea was to tape the accelerometer to a baseball bat and hit the force platform covered with a layer of foam and a piece of wood.

The Wireless Temperature Link was a big hit with the science educators. For their first demonstration they placed it in a vacuum chamber along with the Wireless Pressure Sensor and graphed both pressure vs. time and temperature vs. time to look at their relationship. The Wireless Temperature Link was then placed in front of a silver dish at the focus point of a heat producing light bulb a few meters away. Even though the light bulb and the sensor had some distance between them, you could still see the temperature increasing quickly over time.

Overall, our little field trip to the Ontario Science Centre proved to be a valuable experience not only for the science educators but ourselves as well. It gave them a chance to play with some of our new technology, while coming up with new and innovative demonstrations that could be used by teachers in the classroom.