Sand Diver

摘要

A few years ago, I was preparing to teach a summer enrichment program for middle school students at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. With swimming on the minds of most kids during the summer, I thought buoyancy would be a fun topic to discuss. An interesting way to introduce this concept is by discussing the beer-drinking balloonist who, in a lawn chair, floated to 11,000 feet above Los Angeles1,2 in 1997. However, I needed a hands-on project and was not about to go purchase some lawn chairs to duplicate this experiment. A simple submersible called the "Sand Diver" was designed and is now used as a hands-on activity for my introductory physics course.