Friday, February 17, 2012

What we did after the break

Hey guys, its been a long time since the last post about our classes. After the winter break we started our class by creating an eletro magnet, eletric motor and we also revised 8 points of electricity and magnetism.

Electro  Magnet
To start, we got together in groups of 3 and created an electro magnet to introduce us to electromagnetism. We took a wire and wrapped it around the nail,then we took both ends of the wire and connected each of the ends with the end of each poles of the battery. The wires that were rolled around the nail started to attract the paper clips. That happened because of the eletric field that was produced by the current. It was really fun making this electro magnet in groups because when we were successcul, when the nail attracted paper clips, we got excited and started challenging ourselves to be able to attract more and more paper clips.

http://www.themagnetguide.com/gifs/electromagnet.gif

Eletric Motor
To build and eletric motor was an individual project, in which we were supposed to search on the internet on how to create a motor, build it and show it to our peers.

These were the materials I used to create my motor:
-Transparent Mc Donald's plastic cup
-2 circular magnets
-2 cooper wires covered with plastic having the little grabbers on both ends
-a thin cooper wire
-2 clips
-2 elastics
- big cylindrical battery

I watched this video, and tried to make the same motor:




It was kind of hard to build it, but I tried to copy each step so I would make the motor work. I had to try various times before it worked. The main issue in my motor was the thin cooper wire, because it wasn't a circle, it was hard to the wire stay still as a circle. Also another part that was hard was being able to balance thw thin wire in the middle of the magnets. To make it work we were supposed to give it a ligt push, but the wire was so ligth that it moved places very easily. But after many attempts I was successful.This is how my motor worked:
I think the motor worked because when you connected both sides of the wire to the battery, the battery pushed the electrons and the electrical field was produced because of the movement of electrons. When the electricity got to the top of the motor, where the magnet is below the wire, there will be opposite charges of the magnet and the charge of the electricity from the wire, so it will turn.


8 Points of Eletricity and Magnetism
EM1: I can explain how eletric charges interact
EM2: I can give examples of how charges can be transferred between materials and explain them.
EM3: I can explain how an eletric current is produced.
EM4: I can compare conductors with insulators.
EM5: I can explain how resistance affects current.
EM6: I can use Ohm's law to calculate resistance, current or voltage.
EM7: I can build series and parallel circuits and descrive its parts.
EM8: I can explain the relationship between power, voltag and current.

These are the 8 points that we revised in class, making a packet that we wrote the important points of each topic.
In class we did 8 groups, each group was responsible to explaining one topic. Each group made a poster, with a visual to explain their part, and that's when we took notes in our packet about Magnetism and Eletricity.

EM1 : I can explain how eletric charges interact
-Opposite charges attract each other while same charges repel each other.
The red balls represents the positive charges, and the blue represents the negative charge. In the first example it shows how two positive charges repel each other, showing both arrow pointing to opposite sides. While the second picture, shows the positive and negative charges attracting  each other.

EM2: I can give examples of how charges can be transferred from between materials and explain them.
There are 3 types of tranferring energy:
1.Friction: Rubbing one uncharged object with another.

2. Conduction: Transfer of electrons from a charged object to another object by direct contact.


3. Induction: ovement of electron to one part of an object that is caused by the eletric field of a second object.
  It is important to know that charges are neither created nor destroyed.

EM3: I can explain how an eletric current is produced.
Eletric current is the continuous flow of eletric charges through a material.
-Charges move but energy doesn't.

Eletric Current is produced when 2 wires are connected to both sides of a battery and that makes the electrons flow. But this is a simple example, you can make it more complex. By adding more batteries, current, changing the material of the wire, the teperature, etc.



EM4: I can compare conductors with insulators:
-A conductor is a material through which charge can flow easily.
-An insulator is a material by which charges cannot flow easily, bound tightly with the atoms, do not move easily.
example of conductor :






An example of insulator:


EM 5: I can explain how resistance affects current.
Resistance is the measure of how difficult it is for charges to flow through a material.
The greater the resistance there is less current.

4 factors that can affect resistance:
-the material of the wire
-the length of the the wire
-the diameter of the wire
-the temperature of the wire.

EM6: I can use Ohm's law to calculate resistance, current or voltage.
Resistance = voltage/current

If resistance increases the voltage increases, if the resistance decreases current increases.

EM7: I can build series and parallel circuits and describe its parts.


 
There are 3 parts in a circuit:
- Energy source: The battery makes the charge move around the circuit, gives the push.
- Resistor: The light bulb transform electrical energy to light.
-Switch: open or closes thw circuit.

EM8: I can explain the relationship between power, voltage and current.

Power = Voltage X Current

Power: the rate at which energy is transformed from one form to another.
Voltage: Force that pushes the electrons
Current: the flow of eletric current

I liked doing this activity because it was an easy and effective way of learning or reviewing this topic. We could easily write the main points in our paper because the important things were the things that were written on the poster. We didn't have to go through all the pages of the book.

 

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