Science Week!

We had a really enjoyable week for Science Week. We  had a Zoom workshop with Dublin Zoo on Thursday and we did loads of different experiments about our bodies throughout the week.

We learned loads in our workshop with Kelly from Dublin Zoo. We learned all about endangered species and why they are endangered. Kelly explained to us the differences between Asian and African elephants. She also told us all about other endangered animals like orangutans and rhinos. She then went into great detail about the diets of these animals and what humans can do to help prevent these animals from becoming extinct. It was a really interesting workshop!

Here are just some of the interesting facts we learned:

• A baby elephant is called a “calf”. A group of elephants is called a “herd”.
• Orangutans puff out their cheeks more to make louder calls. They are also the closest animals to humans.
• The ears of Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants.

We tested the effect of exercise on our heart. After much debate as to the location of our pulses, we finally found that we each have a pulse and recorded how many times we felt the beat of our pulse in 1 minute while we were sitting down in class. We then did 5 minutes of exercise and recorded how many times we could record our pulse for 1 minute after our exercise. We compared our results before taking a little rest and recording again. We found that our pulse rate came back down. We then researched and found that the fitter you are, the quicker your pulse rate comes down after exercise. We concluded, that we are all very fit as our pulse rates came right down!

We then examined our fingerprints and experimented how thieves are caught by detectives using their fingerprints. We finished by comparing our finger prints to the ones on the board to define how the guards would be able to identify thieves.

We then did some experiments with our eyes to determine which of our eyes was our dominant eye.This was really interesting as the results showed it wasn’t what we had thought in all our cases. We also checked our blind spots in our eyes. We had great fun!

Our last experiments were around myths to do with our height. We first examined a theory which said taller people have bigger feet than smaller people. We tested this in our groups and we drew conclusions about this theory. Our final experiment was around a theory from an ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius. He said that a person’s arm span was the same as their height. We tested this and found that he was nearly right but not fully. We were surprised to see how close it actually was!