Demonstration of swinging water in a bucket over your head

Summary

We worked on the scientist activity pin during 5 days of day camp. Below is the information for day 2.

Supplies

Weather Belt Loop requirement 2. Set up a simple weather station to record rainfall, temperature, air pressure, or evaporation for one week

Weather BL 1. Make a poster that shows and explains the water cycle.

Scientist 3. Read Newton’s first law of motion. Show in three different ways how inertia works.

Hand out paper with Newton’s first law of motion on it (we will use the paper later) and have one of the scouts read it out loud.
Fill a bucket with water. Swing it around your head. Why don’t you get wet? Have all the scouts do this. Of course some get wet but that is part of the fun! Have them figure out what strategies work best.
Drop a penny into a bottle (from Webelos book). Put a penny on top of a card then on top of a bottle or on top of a jar. Flick or snap the card. What happens to the penny? Inertia should send it to the bottom of the jar while the card go sideways.
Make a line of pennies and flick one into the bottom end and see what moves. Repeat with a stack. Note, this was tricky on old picnic tables but we made it work by using the lid to our supply bin.
Put a glass/cup of water on the table with paper underneath it. Pull the paper out quickly. What happens? This was fun and wet. Note that the paper cups disintegrate fairly quickly so this has to be done and then new cups used for the next experiments.

Scientist: 5. Show the effects of atmospheric pressure.

Scientist 6. Show the effects of air pressure.

Scientist 7. Show the effects of water pressure.

Step 1: have each boy make a ball from 1 in.² paper.
Step 2: have the boys lay the 2 L bottle on its side and stick the ball of paper inside the neck.
Step 3: have the boys blow into the bottle. What happens to the piece of paper ball? It should pop out, which is counterintuitive.
Explain why this happens: due to increased air pressure when you blow into the bottle.

The Upside-Down Glass That Won’t Spill: Fill a drinking glass to the very top with water. The water should spill over the top a bit. Carefully lay the cardboard square to completely cover the top the glass. Holding the cardboard on top, turn the glass over until it is straight upside down. Stop holding the cardboard on as it will stay on by itself. (boyscoutrail.com) Note: we did this with card stock and the paper cups. It worked and then suddenly would fail when the card stock got waterlogged. It was lots of fun for the boys and still demonstrated the principle well.
The Undrinkable Drinks — Using a can opener make a small hole in a can of juice. Try to drink the juice. What happens when you punch another hole in the can? Open a bottle of juice. Add enough water to fill the bottle to the very top. Put in a straw. Use clay to completely block the opening of the bottle around the straw. Try to drink the juice. (boyscoutrail.com) Note: we did this with bottles of water and model magic clay.
Can hole experiment in webelos book. Put the boys in small groups. Each group should have 2 empty cans and a can opener along with a small supply of water.

Step 1: using the can opener, have the boys punch holes approximately evenly around the bottom of one of the cans.
Step 2: using the can opener and the second can, have the boys punch three holes at different levels of the can but not one above each other.
Step 3: fill both cans with water and observe how the different streams behave.
Step 4: discuss why the streams behave this way with the boys.
Note: due to supply issues, we implemented this as a whole group and had one of the adults punch the holes. It mostly worked but we note to anyone following this plan to be careful where you punch the holes to make the experiment work well.

Start: This set of experiments worked well and just had a few adjustments along the way. For example, we didn’t have a working can opener so we used a utility knife from a parent, which meant we only had one can for the can experiment. This worked but you have to be pretty careful where you punch the holes or the experiment doesn’t work well. Also, the paper cups disintegrated very quickly, which causes some experiments to not work. We solved that by using a lot of them.
Stop: Nothing to stop.
Continue: The majority of this worked really well and I would do it again with the adjustments noted above. The bucket swinging experiment was the favorite, as expected. They loved trying it and also getting wet (it was hot!).