Category: science kits

08:28 – I’m still building and shipping science kits. I have a new batch of 30 biology kits binned and ready to finish boxing up, which’ll take an hour or so. Then I’ll get started on another batch of 60 chemistry kits.

Meanwhile, when I have a spare moment, I’m still working on the new Earth Science and AP Chemistry kits. The more I work with the 2013 revision of the AP Chemistry lab curriculum, the less I like it. The pre-2013 curriculum included 22 labs, which I thought was too few. The 2013 revision cuts that to 16 labs, but duplication among those labs reduces it to only 12 or 13. They’ve also narrowed the scope, skipping many major topics that should be covered in a second-year high-school chemistry lab course. And they’ve gone to all “guided-inquiry” labs, which basically means the teacher tells the students what the goal is and leaves it up to them to figure out what to do and how to do it. I don’t think that’s appropriate even in a public school setting with a qualified AP Chemistry teacher, let alone in a homeschool environment. Students should think about what they’re doing and why, certainly, but tossing them in at the deep end results in a lot of flailing around and wasted time. Finally, the official AP Chemistry labs assume a formal high-school chemistry lab is available, with analytical balances, spectrophotometers, pH meters, fume hoods, suction filtration setups, etc. etc. Few homeschool families will have access to that kind of setup. In fact a lot of public high schools don’t.

So we’re going to go our own way. We won’t call the new kit “AP Chemistry”. We’ll call it “Advanced Chemistry” and cover what we think needs to be covered. We’ll certainly cover the key topics in the AP Chemistry lab curriculum, but much else besides.

08:30 – As of this morning, we’re down to only 14 chemistry kits and four biology kits in stock. At recent run rates, that’s maybe a two- or three-day supply, so I’m building more kits today, starting with a batch of 30 biology kits.

15:15 – As always at this time of year, I start thinking about how we could do things more efficiently. I was particularly thinking about that as I was building 30 boxes for biology kits. I use a total of 22 strips of tape to seal a box. To begin with, I invert the box and seal the bottom with four short strips of tape along each short side seam, one strip of tape along the long middle seam, and a long strip of tape across the short dimension in the middle of the box. That’s ten strips so far. I then seal the glued side seam with two more short strips, for a total so far of 12 strips. When I seal the box for shipping, I tape up the top of the box the same way I taped the bottom, ten more strips, for a total of 22 strips of tape per box. No wonder I go through a metric boatload of packing tape.

So I started wondering if I could substitute spray adhesive for the tape. I turns out that I could, but doing so would be extremely expensive and probably no faster than taping. So I started reading up on proper packing methods. It seems that the standard packing method is the two-strip method: one strip down the long seams on the top and bottom of the box, and nothing else. The alternative–recommended by USPS, UPS, and FedEx–is the so-called 6-strip or H-method. The long middle seams on the top and bottom of the box still get one long strip each, that runs 2″ to 3″ down the side of the box. Then each short side seam gets one strip laid down parallel to the seam and folded over the side. Four more strips, for a total of six. I just now shipped my first kit using the H-method on the top of the box. It still makes me nervous, but the people who should know say it’s very secure even using 2″ rather than 3″ packing tape. We’ll see. In my own defense, the boxes I receive from vendors are usually taped more like my former practice. On particularly large/heavy/dense boxes, I swear sometimes they must use most of a roll of tape to seal that one box. Packing tape is cheap; returns and damaged shipments are expensive in more ways than one. But the labor to apply 20+ strips of tape versus only six is also a factor. My engineering nature tells me I should try taping up sample boxes with both methods and then test them to destruction to see how much difference, if any, there really is.

09:48 – Six more kits to ship so far this morning, plus whatever orders come in today before the mailman shows up.

Our component inventory system is starting to break down, as it always does this time of year. The problem is that we have so many different things going on at once that updating component inventories sometimes gets deferred or overlooked completely.

11:46 – Barbara spent the morning cleaning house while I finished the laundry and bottled chemicals. This afternoon we’ll build subassemblies for kits.

Kit orders continue to come in at a good rate. We shipped eight kits Thursday, six Friday, and seven yesterday. If that rate holds up, we’ll have a decent month, assuming we can build and ship kits fast enough to meet demand.

08:06 – I’m still covered up with kit orders, but unfortunately this month isn’t as hectic as August of last year. Through this morning we’re running at about 85% of last August’s overall rate. Still, the second half of the month is always even busier than the first, so we may be able to match last August’s results or nearly so.