Stand out with your junior high school independent research! A collection of fun experiment and craft ideas

Putting an eraser into liquid nitrogen (-196°C) will cause a massive explosion

If you put an eraser in liquid nitrogen (-196°C), it will explode violently!!

This is an experiment about what happens when you put an eraser into liquid nitrogen.

It’s quite a dangerous experiment, but the video alone is plenty intense.

I think it would be interesting to form a hypothesis about why the eraser undergoes a massive explosion due to liquid nitrogen and then actually test it! Be careful to avoid injury when conducting it.

Make a pinhole camera and study its structure

How to make a pinhole camera and a video of shooting with it: welcome to the upside-down world!

For your summer vacation independent project, how about making a pinhole camera? You can easily make one with craft paper, black construction paper, tracing paper, and aluminum foil! First, draw the layouts for an inner box and an outer box on the craft paper and cut them out.

Cut the construction paper to the same shapes and glue it onto the craft paper.

Assemble the boxes so that the black paper faces inward.

Attach tracing paper to the inner box, then sandwich aluminum foil in the pinhole frame and glue it in place.

Make a small hole in the center and attach it to the outer box.

Stack the outer and inner boxes, and your camera is complete! When you look into the box, the world appears upside down—it’s really fun.

Try to use it in a bright place.

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sasashina

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Research the origin of place names

Etymology of the place name “Akihabara”

The place where you live—something you probably don’t usually think about deeply… Place names often reflect the characteristics of the area or things that once existed there.

This is about exploring the roots of such place names.

Since place names sometimes change at certain points in time, it might be even better to look into those changes as well.

Handmade guitar

How to make a cardboard guitar

Many people have probably plucked stretched rubber bands to make sounds.

How about taking that idea further and crafting a high-quality guitar played with rubber bands, paying close attention to its shape and structure? Aim for features similar to a real guitar, such as a sturdy body that resonates well and frets that allow pitch adjustment.

To produce clear sound, the tension of the rubber bands is crucial, so it’s also important to consider safety to prevent the bands from snapping.

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Delightful natural phenomenon

Brinicle- Sinking Brine

There are many astonishing natural phenomena in this world.

The aurora, brinicles, morning glory clouds, and more… How about creating a report that summarizes how they work, where they occur, and beautiful photographs of them? It will surely spark curiosity about the world, nature, and science! Brinicles, which seem almost magical, are highly recommended—they’re truly fascinating.

obscure place names

[Kanji] Hard-to-Read Place and Station Names [Kansai Region Edition]

If you group the many hard-to-read place names—especially common in Hokkaido and Okinawa—by region, you start to see patterns like “in this area, this character is read this way.” For example, on Iriomote Island (西表島) in Okinawa, the character for “west” (西) is read as iri rather than nishi.

Investigating these kinds of tendencies could be interesting.

Difficult place names also exist overseas, so it might be worthwhile to look into examples from English-speaking regions as well.

Survey of familiar invasive species

When I surveyed waterways with Kaneko, they were full of invasive species. [155th video]

There are cases where wild animals and plants we’ve been familiar with since childhood actually came from overseas long ago and took root here.

How about researching such nearby non-native species? It would also be good to look into what kind of impact they have had.