Thinking about STEM

Usually I think about STEAM rather than STEM (include Art), or general geeky stuff like Consumer and Education: 4 Robots That Engage Students in STEM | Robotics Trends, but here I'm just thinking about a specific example. Consider the video of an exploding whale and consequent discussion on Wired Magazine at What’s the Pressure Inside an Exploding Whale?

A whale is a really nice, contained package with a big, big layer of blubber around it that’s designed to keep everything in and keep water out while it’s diving. So they actually make fairly good balloons [..]

And, like most mammals, when they die and they aren’t scavenged—-or they’re too big to be effectively scavenged—-their viscera begins to decompose, whatever contents were in their stomach. That produces methane and hydrogen sulphide and a couple other gases, which are going to begin expanding, especially if it’s sitting in the sun for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, they can explode.

So let’s make a rough, back-of-the-envelope style of calculation, to estimate the pressure inside a bloated beached whale that’s about to explode. The idea is to get a ballpark estimate, that’s within an order of magnitude of the actual result.

Why, you may ask? Because SCIENCE. That’s why.

Here’s the game plan. I’m going to open up the above video in the handy physics video analysis software Tracker....

Now, imagine your ideal high school science curriculum. Does it include this? If not, why not?