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| Pilar Alvarez, Colter Fellows, and Luke Rodarte enjoy their ice cream |
This is the kind of experiential learning that motivates: make your own ice cream, then eat it!
On our first snow day of the 2011-2012 school year, Physical Science students did just that.
In physical science, we've been talking about states of matter and phase changes. To see it in action, our class created a liquid cream mixture, then cooled it off into ice cream. To achieve this phase change without a freezer [even the snow outside was not quite cold enough], we surrounded the cream with ice and salt. Ice is cold, and the salt keeps the ice colder, even though it turns it into a liquid. This is also the reason we put salt on the roads, as it keeps the water from freezing, even as temperatures drop below 0C. Eventually, the liquid cream solidified into the tasty treat we all know and love, and it tasted almost as good in the snow as it does on a summer afternoon!
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| Luke Rodarte, loving his home-made ice cream |
