Hydrometer

 I was surprised how few students had met a hydrometer before. A simple experiment making different strength sugar solutions and measuring their strength using the hydrometer.

Osmosis and Visking Tubing.

 Osmosis and Visking Tubing. It took overnight to run but we managed to get the water to enter the bag fill it full and push the level up the tubing. An hour in the lab was not enough.

Design and Patents act

 Attempting to make Copyright, Designs and Patents more exciting. Learning about what they can do without breaking copyright laws.

Calipers

 Ask a student to measure something, and then they will grab a ruler. But sometimes we need to be more accurate, and in comes the Vernier or Digital Calipers, something many have never met before.

Steam generator

 Using a steam generator to heat up a syringe to 100C then injecting a known volume of a volatile substance to see it turn to gas. t takes quite a long time to get everything to 100C but the results are worth it.

Resonance Driver Experiment

 We measured the spring and weight moving up and down using @pascoscientific sensors and Capstone. Then we set up a resonance driver and the students had to predict the driver frequencies.

How a slide Rule works

 What are logarithms, how do they work, and why do we use them.? Students learnt that I lived in a time BC (Before Calculators), why I needed a slide rule, and how it worked using two rulers working as a number line. We also looked at log tables. Rather Frightening.

Resonance 2

 How different lengths of metal vibrate at different frequencies and relating this to the driving frequency. Prediction is the next critical stage. Can these be predicted - Yes!

Biology Environmental changes

 Pictures in the news appropriately remind the students of the environmental changes we are looking at in Biology. How climate change is really affecting people's lives in this country.

Making Slime

One of the most fun experiments, that many students have done at home before, but now they learn how it works and why. Many good recipes given and a few failures.

Calculating KE

 Putting a formula into @pascoscientific Capstone, running the experiment, and live plotting the data from the equation. Using the smartcart at the end of a spring the students were able to calculate and graph the Kinetic Energy in simple Harmonic Motion.

Implicit Differentiation

 Trying to unravel the mysteries of implicit differentiation. Not the easiest of topics, especially when all the accumulated knowledge so far is required to solve and tidy up these equations.

Resonance

 Seeing Simple Harmonic Motion everywhere. If we vibrate this wire too much it snaps and the piano wire did, which led to interesting discussions on metal stress and fatigue.

Milk

 It was interesting talking to students about Milk and the things I learned. Generally, milk was perceived as being unhealthy for you - way too much fat content ( 3.5%) and many of the alternatives chosen were based on advertising rather than any accurate information.

Modern Webpage Design

 The computing books look at Web pages designed using Notepad, which is what I taught 30 years ago. We looked at more modern software like Nicepage and others to create webpages that do all the clever things and how much web pages have changed through the years.

Electric Fields

Creating parallel and radial electric fields from a Static electric feed rather than an EHT device. It works better.

 

Fractional Distillation of Oil

Starting with Synthetic Crude Oil the students heated the oil progressively heating it to a higher temperature and collecting the fractions. The first fraction burnt but the subsequent ones apart from the last wouldn't burn.

 

Pressure inside a ballooon

 Is the pressure inside an inflated balloon greater than that in a deflated balloon? The debate raged on until with a @Pascoscientific wireless pressure sensor proved that the pressure was indeed 1.1 KPa higher in the inflated balloon - the elasticity of the balloon to blame.

Curves

 Now draw a nice smooth curve through all the points

Static Electricity to Direct Current Demo

 A good fun experiment taking the static electricity from a Wimshurst machine and passing this to a capacitor plate and using a graphite-covered ping pong ball to transfer the charges which can then be picked up on a beam galvanometer.

Biodiversity

Thank goodness some councils in England are seeing sense in biodiversity. The councils are starting to leave large areas of parks to go more native, and as a result, there is a burst of biodiversity coming along.

 

Barton’s pendulums

 Why do the pendulum’s the same length power each other but the ones that are different lengths don’t. Some homework to keep the students busy

Temperature and rates of reactions

Not so easy to do in an hour, to set up the solutions at the correct temperature and do all the experiments but we succeeded with time to space thanks to doing this with @pascoscientific colourimeter and Capstone Software.

 

Rates of Reaction

 Starting with the experiment and working out the individual rates of each reaction using the reaction of Sodium Thiosulfate and Hydrochloric acid in a @pascoscientific colourimeter, the students then plotted the rates against concentration and were pleased to get a relationship.

By pooling the class results, they got a set of error bars that showed the experiment could either be a curve 2nd order or a straight line first order.

Simple Harmonic Motion

We had considerable fun using @Pascoscientific sensors to create a series of experiments to demonstrate simple Harmonic Motion. The students learnt a lot about the properties of pendula because they could set up and record so many experiments in such a short time.

 

Mk2 Circle to Sine Wave

 Making sense of CAST diagrams - how the circle maps onto a sinewave using some @Lego to help. Using an offset wheel to produce a sinewave as the wheel rotates, then showing the same on the @Casio GG50 calculator.

More fun than Hookes Law

A bit more fun than Hookes Law, using the @Lascells Strip Tester to find the stretch and then the breaking point of carrier bags. Which company sold the most robust bags? Even tried out a vintage Woolworths bag.

 

Air Pollution Topic

Biology Air Pollution Topic Practical Measuring the Air Pollution levels using the @Pocketlab Air recording the levels of particulates in different sites gives a series of horror stories relating to the air we breathe.

Punched Card

 Students ask me what sort of computer I used when I was at school. I didn't because only when I went to University did they have one, and then it was run-off punched cards learning Fortran, Algol 68 and Coral 66, and the computer took up the top floor of the Uni.