Last week on the excellent Prof Brian Cox show Human Universe TV show a wonderful real life experiment was shown. It is common at school to learn about gravity, about mass and weight. Often the original concepts from Galileo around dropping objects are covered and considered. We now see footage from space and weightlessness.
However in this experiment a giant vacuum hall is used to show the difference air resistance makes. Being told a heavy thing like a bowling ball or a light thing like a bunch of feathers we are taught from our own observations that the ball will drop faster. In this clip though the air is removed from the environment and we get to see the ball and feathers drop at the same rate. It is spooky, despite knowing the science. You can see from the scientists reaction how special it is to see this. It is real life magic at work.

I have shown the predlets and they are bemused and intrigued too.
I have always wanted to the predlets to feel the wonder of science. We spend a lot of time on screens looking at the virtual. This is all great, but the real thing can be even more amazing.
We just took delivery of a proper telescope this week to be able to check out the night sky. This was in part from being at a friends and all the kids wanting to see the moon close up with their scope, in part because of the wonder at the size of the universe playing space games on Oculus Rift like Elite Dangerous and the influence of TV shows like Human Universe.
I remember looking up in awe at all the constellations and planets, and of course the moon when I was about 7 and armed with a pair of binoculars.
This box arrived from Amazon

After a little bit of assembly it looked like this.

The Equatorial mount on it is, if you are used to 3d applications, really interesting. 3 axis of movement but up is not always up :). You get this in 3d when your rotations are relative not absolute.
There are lots of things to consider setting it up, but just with the basics I pointed it at the moon for us last night. We used the 20mm lens that came with it. We got a pretty full frame moon.
Taking a photo was tricky as I did no have a camera mount, and only the iPhone. However jiggling it around a bit I ended up with this

The predlets we somewhat agast seeing the craters in this close. Obviously they have seen photos before but seeing it yourself certainly does something different. It did when I was a kid so fingers crossed.
Later I spent some time exploring how to line the thing up, adjust the right bits and pieces and there is lots more to explore 🙂
Also as a side effect, as kids always like to play with the boxes of things, we ended up with a lot of cardboard just on the day school asked for some to be brought in for a makefest that they are doing in years 3/4 🙂
TV/internet/games etc might be considered sedentary and lazy, but they can be used to inspire and explore and raise awareness.