Hands on learning took on a Thanksgiving vibe this week in Mr. Blevin’s Anatomy class at the students cleaned uncooked turkey legs of soft tissues before breaking them in a custom bone breaking jig. Lily Greenfield, Naomi Little, Abby Lee, and Danika Huff worked together to prepare their turkey leg before heading over to see how much force it took to break it.
“We are cleaning and breaking the bone to identify the different parts,” said Greenfield.
Preparing the bone for breaking was no simple task. “It was pretty hard because a lot of the connective tissues were stuck on there. We had to get most of it off to be able to break it,” said Little.
According to science teacher Mr. Blevins, the contraption was custom built by Mr. Barbanera when we was a science teacher at Lakes. Barbanera recently took the helm of the science department at Antioch.
The girls disagreed on how gross the lab actually was. On a one to ten scale, the gross factor was all over the place. Lee said, “It was a ten, but also a nine on the coolness scale,” while Huff said “personally it was a two or three.”
When reflecting on the lab, the girls were surprised at how strong the leg bone actually was. They recorded a breaking force of 806 Newtons, or about 181 pounds of force. Before trying this with a leftover Thanksgiving carcass, Blevins cautions that bones that have been cooked are much weaker than these bones. Additional pictures are below.
