Physics

Aluminum foil circuits

9/6/22: We made a circuit using aluminum foil, holiday lights, brads, batteries, and a folder.

When the brads were touching the aluminum foil, the lights turned on, but once you take off the brads, or take them from the aluminum foil, then the lights would turn off.

If we added more lights, then all of them would be dimmer, and if we changed the battery, the lights would get stronger or weaker depending on the battery we added.

The series circuit is different from the parallel because we used many more lights and brads to turn the other lights on, and once we had made the parallel circuit, we were able to turn the lights on and off at will.

The way that they're different is that when you're making a parallel circuit, they're more complicated, and take resistors, not ammeters.

If we did this again, I would like to use more batteries, or a stronger battery to show how strong the lights would be.

Lantern Project

11/17/22

The lantern project was a project that included making a lantern with a famous person related to science on it.

We were instructed to make these to help with the lantern parade, and we also had to put lanterns up around the school to help.

To make these, we used a program called Inkscape to make the model of both the sides that didn't include the face, and the face.

After we made the models, we used a laser cutout to cut out the shapes, glued it together, and set it up along the strings with all of the other ones people made.

Hoverboard

12/1/22

Hoverboard Part 1

Our first issue was how to draw a circle evenly. We decided to use a two-foot string tied to two pencils, using one pencil to draw and the other as a center point. After drawing our circle we realized the wood needed to be more significant to make an even circle. However, after cutting and sanding, the flat edges turned out to be fine. We divided the work to make more progress, with some people cutting the plastic sheeting while others drilled holes and wrapped the edges in duct tape. Before drilling the holes in the wood we had a bit of confusion and debate about how and where to drill them, we were careful to do nothing permanent until we were sure what to do. While drilling we had an issue with our drill, but the other group finished using theirs and gave it to us.

Hoverboard part 2

To wrap the wooden disk in duct tape, we propped it up between two tables and had one person place the duct tape while another person turned the disk and checked the tape was secure. We used the string and pencil trick again to cut out the plastic sheeting, and then make a 9-inch circle for the holes.

This method ended up being more difficult than we thought, but we got the circles drawn in the end. We realized that the hole we made wasn’t big enough for the bolt, so we had to expand it. Since we no longer had access to the engineering room, it took us longer than we were expecting to make the hole for the vacuum since we had to drill it, but we found a way to do it with the drill. There was an incident with the tape. Despite what the instructions said was necessary, the ring of tape around the edge prevented the hoverboard from working properly.

Hoverboard Final

Our project related to Newton's first law because while people were moving on the hovercraft, they had to be aware of inertia as they moved and changed dictions. Newton's second law was involved with the maximum weight we could have on the hoverboard. Newton's third law was involved because of the opposing forces of the vacuum's applied force and the gravity acting on the person and hoverboard.

Superhero Project

In this project, we had to choose an element, and develop a superhero based on it. I picked carbon, and found out many compounds and powers based on carbon in real life. We also had to write a letter to another element in order to bond with them, and convince them to bond with us.

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