Shake a box
Can you locate the wooden blocks?
What you need
- shoe box
- 2 small wooden blocks
- sticky tape
- marble
- pencil
- paper
- a friend
What to do
- Sticky tape the wooden blocks to the bottom of the inside of the shoe box.
- Put the marble in the shoe box and close the lid.
- Give the box to a friend and ask them to gently move the box so the marble rolls around.
- Can your friend use the marble to figure out where the wooden blocks are positioned? Ask them to draw a map of the bottom of the box showing where the blocks are.
- Open the box to check if they are correct.
What's happening?
The locations of the blocks in the shoe box are found using senses other than sight. Your friend could hear and feel the marble bumping into the blocks, and from this work out their positions.
While some animals use sight to navigate, find food and find a mate, other animals use different senses to do these things. Some bats make high pitched sounds which bounce off objects before returning to their ears. This is called echolocation and they use this to figure out where things are. A platypus can find prey underwater using receptors in its bill to detect electrical signals. Humans use SONAR (SOund Navigation And Ranging) to find things like submarines and shipwrecks underwater. A pulse of sound is sent out and reflected back from an object. The time the sound takes to get back to the source helps to work out how far away the object is.
