Want to make a lava lamp at home? Or try baking some popping candy cupcakes?
National Science Week is on this week and while lockdown in the ACT and much of the country means face-to-face events have been cancelled, some much-loved institutions such as Questacon are powering ahead with online content and experiments you can try at home.
Leading by example is Questacon's senior manager centre's Angie Good who has been entertaining her daughters, Estella, seven, and Beatrix, five, at home with experiments such as some involving slime and the good old packet-of-Mentos-in-soft-drink-bottle trick, also taking her cues from the Questacon at Home page on its website.
Questacon at Home was created last year in response to the Covid lockdowns and, fortunately or unfortunately, still remain a relevant resource. You can share your home experiments on social media with the hashtag #questaconathome
"The Questacon at Home page was deliberately set up to provide easy activities to do at home using at-home ingredients, that people will find around the home. There's videos and it's really accessible," Angie said.
While they had hoped to put on a range of live events during Science Week, the team at Questacon team had also been preparing for Lockdown 2.0
"I think the staff really love that opportunity to engage face-to-face with the public but at least we're still maintaining that opportunity for audience to engage with science," she said.
National Science Week 2021 also has some home experiments at www.scienceweek.net.au/ including some delicious ones based on its schools' theme Food: Different by design.
You can try to make lava lamps, poppy candy cupcakes, sherbet fizz or marshmellow constructions.
Adults can also have fun making colour-change cocktails.
Angie said science was actually a great distraction during lockdown, including for her girls, providing some incidental learning.
"They sometimes categorise it as craft which I think is great because sometimes there's a taboo with science, but at the end of the day, it's all science," she said.
"Craft is science and science is craft at the end of the day."
And she doesn't worry about them getting messy in the process.
"No, that's part of the fun," she said.
"There's limited options for getting out and having fun at the moment with the lockdown, so to get out in the backyard and do some science and craft, that's great."
