Page 78 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

6 Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community 55

a few bumps on my head for not watching.) It was found only after my departure
that the two fire extinguishers in the basement were not functioning and that there
were cracks in the basement walls making it a dangerous place to be.
More frequently than not we went to the “lab.” Because there was no running
water, this meant that the students had to bring buckets of water that we needed in
some experiments. Since the booklet was small and only had sufficient experiments
for a 1-year course, I added other experiments by extending existing ones. For
example, we had available the materials to conduct a simple experiment on the ther-
mal expansion of matter. In fact the experimental setup is so simple that it can be
made from household and other cheap and readily available materials in a hardware
store (Fig. 2).
The idea of the original experiment was simple (Fig. 2a). Get some steam into a
pipe fixed at one end with a clothespin and the pipe will expand, especially in
length. If the free end of the pipe rests on a needle with a cardboard dial attached
to it, even a minute extension in the length of the pipe will be translated into a
noticeable turn of the dial, amplified by the small diameter of the needle pin. In the
original experiment, comparisons were made between different materials (e.g.,
aluminum, glass, and copper). As a physicist I knew that the thermal expansion in

Fig. 2 A simple eighth-grade science experiment on the thermal expansion of matter. (a) The
original experiment. (b) Several variations were made to allow determining the dependence of
expansion on temperature, material, and length