Engineering experiment - rollers and friction
This engineering experiment gives your students the opportunity to investigate friction by using rollers to move objects and see how friction is reduced. When they master the process they can even have races!
Making a windmill is fun but it also allows your students to investigate the power of the wind and to consider how and why that energy might be captured and utilized. It’s a great way to open a discussion about renewable energy sources and their relative strengths and weaknesses.
This air science experiment introduces your students to aerodynamics -the way air moves around objects and how the shape of those objects affects where the air goes. In this case they learn that blowing against a flat surface in front of an upright piece of paper does not make the paper move, but blowing on a curved surface just might!
I bet you never thought you could build your own clock, but you can, of sorts! This version of a sand clock works in exactly the same way as traditional hour glasses and is a fun engineering experiment for your students.
Air pressure is amazing! Did you know you could use it to hold water in a cup, even when it’s upside down! Your students will love this air pressure experiment, it has the wow factor.
Take a magnifying glass and use it to concentrate the heat from the sun onto the side of a balloon. What do you think will happen?
In this exciting energy science experiment your students will begin to understand the heat energy produced by the sun.
In this science experiment about weather your students will be able to investigate the wind and make observations about the direction it is blowing from. They will learn to read a compass in order to name the wind, ie northerly, easterly etc. And yet all you need for this experiment other than the compass is a bit of cardboard and a piece of string!
This is another one of those experiments I remember doing when I was a child. I spent hours wandering the house on a wet weekend playing my tissue box guitar trying different combinations and I’m pretty sure I managed to play Mary Had A Little Lamb at one point! Your students will really enjoy this lesson as it is something they can relate to and enables them to do their own investigations into sound.
While working on a unit to teach my class how to write explanations, I came across this video called “How it’s made: Pencils” and I have to say I found it quite fascinating! Ok, maybe I’m easily amused, but my class really enjoyed it too. We watched it, then watched it again and drew flowcharts of the process, then wrote explanations titled “How are pencils made?”
I think this video would be of interest for other reasons too, if only to show children how machines are designed to perform specific tasks and how quick they can be. Did you know that the machine that stamps the writing onto the side of the pencil can stamp 500 pencils a minute? Sometimes it’s nice to think about where something you take for granted comes from.
This is another one of those experiments that is more like a magic trick. You can use it to trick your friends in not one but TWO different ways. You can either challenge them to blow up a balloon in a bottle, or ask them if they believe you can inflate a balloon and leave it inflated without closing the mouth of the balloon. This experiment shows you how to do both and explains how they work – it’s all about air pressure.
