Class Update

Monday, March 29th. All about Gears. That was our topic today. We looked at the difference between pinion gears and spur gears, how gear ratios will affect the power and speed of their vehicles and how wheel size can have an impact as well. We looked at the How Stuff Works website on gears for more information and demonstrations. http://science.howstuffworks.com/gear-ratio.htm Check it out. Tomorrow we will work on our cars again. We are still gathering materials for building our cars and wheels to use as well. No Homework this week. Grandparents day on Friday as well.

Class Update

Friday, March 26th. We spent the day working on our Electric Vehicles (EV) and starting to do some work on our wikipage. Each team has a page on the wiki where they will document their work and explain some of the choices that they made in the design process. Check out the wiki at: http://www.cfs-ev2010.wikispaces.com to see what is happening with their vehicles. We went over some of the specifics about Ohm's law on Thursday and practiced using multimeters to measure voltage, current, and resistance in a simple circuit. We will be using these multimeters to test our solar charging stations and electric vehicles as well.

Class Update

Wednesday, March 24th. Today we puzzled through the details of the reading on voltage and current. The reading was pretty dense, we focused in on voltage, current and resistance. We defined each looked at how they affect circuits and then looked at Ohm's law (V = I x R) and how to calculate one part if you know the other two parts. For homework I gave everyone an excerpt from "The Way Things Work" by David MacCauley. It uses the analogy of water to explain an electrical circuit. Monday we discussed the film "Kilowatt Ours" by Jeff Barrie, that the class watched last week when I was in Philadelphia for the National Science Teachers Association conference. Tuesday we worked on our electric vehicles. They are looking for materials to use in building their cars and will get to work on them again on Friday.

Class Update

Tuesday, March 16th. Yesterday we introduced the STEP project from NCSU that we will be participating in this year. STEP (Sustainable Transportation Education Project) is a pilot program from the Schools of Engineering and Education at NCSU. Students will work in teams of 3-4 to design, build and test battery powered model cars. They will use Solar panel recharging stations to charge the batteries in their cars and do research and testing of their designs to get optimum speed and endurance from their vehicles. On Tuesday we worked in our teams to start the designing and building process. It is a block week schedule this week. I will be gone to Philadelphia for the NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) conference on Thursday and Friday. Tonie Lilley will be my sub and the group will be watching "Kilowatt Ours" a documentary about how electricity is produced in the Southeastern states.

Class Update

Thursday, March 11th. Tuesday we took notes based on the reading. We looked at static electricity, the properties of positive and negative charges, how electrical force decreases as distance increases, and how charges can be transferred by friction and contact. Homework was collected and we worked on the posters for their experiments. This work continued through Wednesday and on Thursday we hung the posters in the hallway in time for Science Day (Friday, March 12).

Class Update

Monday, March 8th. Today we spent class time preparing our science experiment posters. Some people were finishing up gathering data. Some folks were writing up their procedures and conclusions and others were making charts, graphs, or tables to show their results. We have homework due tomorrow: Reading and 3 questions from the book.

Class Update

Friday, March 5th. Today we made electromagnets by wrapping wire around bolts and tested their strength by seeing how many paperclips they could lift. We found that increasing the number of windings we were able to pick up more paperclips. We also made model DC motors with magnets and loops of wire. It took some tweaking, but we were able to get most of them to run pretty smoothly. We looked at how we might increase the strength/speed of the motors by increasing the number of windings, increasing the voltage, or by increasing the strength of the permanent magnets.

Class Update

Thursday, March 4th. Today we explored the world of DC motors and how it is possible to get them to generate electricity as well. We were able to puzzle through how they work as motors, but were less successful at getting them to work as generators. But we shall try again. We also decided to put off the homework deadline until Tuesday, March 8th. Too much going on with the Science Experiments and trying to get them finished by this weekend. We will be spending time on Monday and Wednesday of next week polishing up our results, making graphs, typing summaries, and creating our posters which are due on Thursday, March 11th. In these pictures we were using one motor as a wind generator to power the other motor as a fan. We couldn't quite spin it fast enough.

Class Update

Wednesday, March 3rd. Monday we worked on developing our ideas for science experiments and research projects that will be turned into posters. If they want to they can present these posters during Science Day on March 12. Tuesday we played around with batteries, wires and holiday bulbs to make them light up. We learned about series and parallel circuits and drew pictorial diagrams of the different circuits. Homework for Friday, March 5th. Read pages 430-436 and answer questions 2, 4, & 6. Wednesday we learned how to draw schematic diagrams of our circuits and defined some basic electricity terms.