I know a retired physics teacher from Berkeley and he has looked at some of these labs and told me right off the bat that certain parts of them would not work. You have to be on your toes to use this book we had 4 Mother's go through all the labs together and teach it to a group of 6 kids and the attention span for the kids ages 12 to 15 was not t
...Read MoreRead more about I know a retired physics teacher fromhere and these are kids who have done algebra so they should have been prepared to do this lab book but again some of the labs were so long that their attentions did not last. Certain labs were really fun. For the wave tank we used glass casserole pans and household items and it was a hit, everyone loved that lab. The students could not build paper airplanes good enough to complete lab one. Lab 3 surprised the students and they enjoyed that. They enjoyed loved 4 and it was easy to accomplish lab 5 was a favorite they absolutely loved it and we needed way more than one egg each. They like lab 6 and it's doabeau lab 7 was difficult there were so many variables that we couldn't see any difference between air foils AB or C period it was really hard to keep the angle of the hair dryer the same and the straws touching the edge of the table kept the foil from sliding so you have to make sure that the strings the track for the air foil is level and even and that the straws are not getting stuck. Students enjoyed lab 8. Lab 9 And other labs that need rubber stoppers you need to know that rubber stoppers have sizes to them such as 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 and you need to make sure that they fit your test tubes for other labs and you need to make sure that you can get your thermometer through the hole in the stopper you do not need a hotplate for any of the labs you can do stoves if you're in your house when you get to the lab that wants a Bunsen burner you need to buy a Bunsen burner that can attach directly to a small propane tank do not get the student school Bunsen burners that have to attach to a table in a school laboratory setting that has propane tanks under-the-table and the attachment is on the face of the table. Labs 10 and 11 works fine the kids didn't love them but nor did they hate them and complain about them like some of the other labs that took too long to do period this book is advanced the children need to have a solid 2 hour attention span they need to be able to focus for 2 hours to complete most of these labs. Lab 12 with the ripple tank comes out to about $700 if you try to buy it the way it says to do it but we used a large glass casserole Pan a drywall tool as the wave generator and a finger as a circular wave we used barriers like woodblocks bricks magnets anything heavy that you can set in the water like cans of food you need to use wax paper to reflect the waves under your ripple tank so that when it gets dripped on you can wipe it dry and continue to use it for the rest of the lab you need a strong light above your ripple tank we did do it in a lighted room with sunlight coming in and it was awesome to watch the ripple patterns the kids loved this lab They enjoyed playing with it and they enjoyed experimenting with it. Lab 13 is cool lab 14 was very fun to play with the kids loved it again their attention span was too short to assemble everything and then enjoy playing with it but it's a good lab lab 16 and 17 you can do together at the same time they have the same equipment there's no need to get it out twice. Love 18 was great no issues except you need to make sure that Strong magnets do not get the wimpy magnets off of Amazon and many of the boxes of magnets of Amazon are coming where one magnet in the set works and the other magnet is garbage. Labs 19 and 21 are electromagnetic labs and we had some issues getting any results from these we watched YouTube videos and it seems like we need a lot more coils of wire for both of those labs one scientist was using 20 coils of wire now lab 20 the building a Leyden jar, that was a disaster and did not work. But the Leyden kits that cost $14 and a fly stick to charge it. We skipped the vandagraph part of this lab. The kids enjoyed lab 22 you have to be careful that all of your pieces fit into your Breadboard. You could do it at the same time that you do lab D because they are the same materials lab 23 building a bristlebot was amazing and fun they loved that lab 24 is on safety and you can combine it with another lab they love lab 25 they loved lab 26 complicated and has a lot of parts but they loved it they loved loved 27. Lab D is pretty complicated but very cool there are however some missing bits of information Junction transistors and resistors have Watts so when you go to buy these pieces you need to have a knowledge of what what you want to purchase the physics teacher told us to get quarter Watt transistors and quarter Watt resistors he also said to use a 1000 I'm a resistor instead of the 220 or 470. Physics teacher also had some fun things to help us out with part 2D where you are supposed to test a variety of other objects so what you're doing is you've built a little static electricity detector and you have built a wire your wire is going to transfer the static electricity that you create with these objects so the students can use a glass rod a balloon and a plastic sheet and anything else that you can rub that will hold a static electricity charge. So he said that your body is the conductor and when the student holds the electrostatically charged object and puts it by the antenna that your LED is going to light up and he said that the tinfoil would be really fun because it's polarized so one side of the tin foil will hold a charge and the other side won't which is something that they should have learned from the Laden jar lab so that would be a fun tie in to see how much they remembered and learned from that lab. Lab e is Lewis structures and we bought a kit to build the molecules with and we printed off colored picture charts to show the kids. Lab f is simple and cool. We had 4 mom's do this curriculum we met once a week for about 2 hours and this book stressed us all out we would never finish it if we had not shared the workload. We are amazed at how much we learned and how much the kids learned. Read LessRead less about I know a retired physics teacher from