Physics Day Update

Physics Day is a go! We will be showing off all our physic experiments on March 31st in the school gym. As far as we know right now, we will not be using the air track. Right now, our line up looks like:

1. Rocket Launch (Class Experiment)

2. Duck Call (Interactive Presentation)

3. Electromagnetic Thingy (Class Experiment)

4. Dry Ice Bubble (Interactive Presentation)

5. Doorbell Set-Up (Class Experiment)

6. Make Your Own Slime (Interactive Presentation)

7. Potato Accelerator (Class Experiment)

8. Hoop Glider (Interactive Experiment)

9. Wind Tunnel (Class Experiment)

10. Hovercraft (Class Experiment)

11. Trebuchet (Class Experiment)

Everything labeled Class Experiment, is pretty self explanatory. It's whatever a group has already done in class, and will be presented on Physics Day. All of the interactive presentations are something we've picked out for the younger kids to do and be a part of. Yes, keep in minds that this is for younger kids, so nothing is going to get SUPER complicated. 

So, yeah. We're set for March 31st, and that's our line up. Voilà!

Update!

The balloon thing is over! I don't know why, but everything we tried failed. Maybe it was materials, a patience issue, or just bad luck, but our balloons never lifted off the ground. So now we're moving on.

We've decided that this Physics class should do something that is more geared towards the community. So, we've decided to do a sort of Physics science fair for younger kids. We've thrown out a BUNCH of ideas out there, and so far we've worked out an experiment with an air track to show elastic and inelastic collisions.

Le Air Track

An elastic collision is essentially a collision between two bodies. The total kinetic energy of those two bodies is equal before and after the collision, which means that they follow the law of conservation of momentum. Here is an example of an elastic collision, thank you Wikipedia.

An inelastic collision is when kinetic energy isn't conserved. Inelastic collisions don't conserve kinetic energy, but they too follow the law of conservation of momentum. Here is an example of an inelastic collision, thank you Wikipedia.

This will hopefully be the first of many experiments that will all be put together for a science fair!