Aarya's blog

My name is Aarya Dalal. I’m in the 4th grade at Ardenwood Elementary in Fremont,CA. I started to learn coding at Violet Puple and my interest grew so I continued on with more classes. I participated in Violet Purple in 2019 and saw my project launch to the ISS Spx-17 on April 25th, 2019. I like science, space, dancing, singing, collecting rocks & sea shells. One day I hope to be a dancer & would also love to travel to outer space.

I learned some cool experiments in Violet Purple. We mainly learned about heat & radiation. We learned which colors would heat up or cool down faster. We also learned how to program with the Ev3 block using Lego Mindstorms, which helped record the readings of our experiments.

The experiment was selected for us so that we can learn about heat & radiation in a better way. As I worked on my experiment, I got a better understanding of how different colors react to heating and cooling. I thought that white would cool down faster than black, as I was always told by my parents that white reflects heat (which is also true). But, I found out that Black cooled down faster than White. This is because, darker colors like Black absorb energy faster - so it heats up faster. But, it also releases energy faster than white. This way, Black cools down faster also. This surprised me as I did not think in this way about heat and radiation.

This can help humankind learn how to build houses and other buildings as we colonize other planets in the future. We may use white or lighter colors for the structures based on what I learned from my experiment, so that structures can be cooler during the day and warmer during night.

To perform our experiment, we were divided into groups. This was helpful, as working in groups gave us more ideas and we were able to help each other learn faster. My group and I had a lot of help and guidance from our teachers at Violet Purple. They were very patient and helped make things very clear to me. This helped me become more confident of doing things myself. I also got more interested in Space and learning how to program, and how that will help me as I grow up.

I found out that the next experiment we will do will be about conduction and heat transfer. I’m very excited to learn how that will affect colonization of other planets.