Room 16 – Forces are all around us!
This term, Room 16 has been learning about Forces for our Physical Sciences Unit. Students are expressing an interest in this topic and enjoy sharing their own experiences and understanding of forces in and around their home and school environments.
Together, we have been learning how a force acts on an object to make it move in different directions. Some of these forces include ‘push’, ‘pull’, ‘gravity’, ‘resistance’ and ‘lift’. We know the difference when a ‘push’ force is acting on an object to move the object away from us and when a ‘pull’ force is moving the object towards us. ‘Gravity’ is another pull force that pulls objects down to the ground, ‘air resistance’ (‘drag’) works against gravity. We explored these with our parachutes. ‘Lift’ is used when we fly a paper plane.
Catapults
We followed a procedure to make our own mini catapults and experimented with them. We talked about the amount of ‘pull’ force used when we pulled the basket down and released. We also discussed how changing the angle and pivot point of the lever can influence the flight of the object in the catapult. We experimented with different objects and weights to see how far they would go.
Push and Pull with our Room 19 buddies
We worked with our Room 19 buddies to create a balloon powered car. We had to design it so the wheels would turn and allow the ‘push’ force from the air leaving the balloon to move the car. This was more challenging than we thought and we had to manipulate our creations when they didn’t work. The Room 16 buddies were in control of blowing up ‘balloon power’, but if the Room 19 buddies helped, they used their own straw.
Parachutes with Room 1
We have been designing and creating parachutes with our Room 1 buddies. First, we designed what our parachutes were going to look like and labelled the materials we would use. We then had a go at making the ‘basket’ of our parachutes by thinking about a cube and what it would look like as a net.
Once we completed the rest of our parachutes, we tested them. Some of our designs needed modifications, one being more air resistance, so it didn’t fall and crash to the ground as fast.
