Tuesday 14 May 2024

Water Turbine


 The water turbine shows a set of energy conversions that the students are quite familiar with. Gravitational potential energy is converted to Kinetic to Electrical in the generator and from there into light. I am not so sure about the Coloured Wheel, but it is interesting and gives rise to lots of interesting Physics discussions.

Monday 13 May 2024

The Brain


 Looking at the Brain and revision, try juggling for 5 minutes between 20 revision sessions. Juggling lets some of the brain relax while working on the hand-eye coordination centre. After juggling, learning is better, and memory recall is more effective.

Saturday 11 May 2024

Inside a Laptop


 A laptop hard disk upgrade gave many students their first look inside a laptop, allowing them to find and identify the parts and compare them to the desktop version. Changing to an SSD improved the boot time of the laptop, making it usable again as well as gaining an extra TB of storage.

Friday 10 May 2024

Testing for chemicals


 Putting on their detective hats, the students tried to determine the mystery chemical. A good, fun experiment, with the students discovering that a negative test was almost as good as a positive one in detective work. I just wish I had a Mass Spectrometer - even more fun.

Thursday 9 May 2024

Energy Conversions


Energy conversions: the Steam Engine. Chemical energy in the fuel is turned into thermal energy and then into kinetic energy. Passing down a pully for gear reduction to change from spinning to a vertical motion and powering several different devices from one. One device: so much Physics.

Wednesday 8 May 2024

A level Math


 Students working out just what formulae are and are not in the exam sheet. Then, the panic can begin to memorise the formulae that are not given.

Tuesday 7 May 2024

Fun with Electrostatics


 I'm having some fun with the students investigating Electrostatics. We are deflecting water, moving suspended rods, charging hair, fixing balloons to walls and ceilings, and fixing plastic and paper to windows with no glue, just some charge. Then, using amber to clean a PC fan of dust.

Set up for molten electrolysis

  Setting up ready to do electrolysis of a molten substance. Most of these are too dangerous to do in the lab and require a fume cupboard to...