Our learning context this term is ‘transport’.
As part of the planning process for our learning context, we came up with some questions we needed answered. One of our questions was ‘how do cars travel on different surfaces; how can they sometimes skid and sometimes not skid?‘.
In order to help us answer this, we looked at a PowerPoint presentation all about something called ‘friction‘. Friction is a force between two surfaces.
We learned that the more friction there is between the two things, the slower the object may move. So if a car was travelling on the road, there is more friction than if it was travelling on the ice. The car would be more likely to slip on the ice as there is less friction.
To test this out, we took a car and a ramp around the school. Before hand though we made predictions about which surface would produce the least friction with the car.
We let the car travel down the ramp onto different surfaces. The first surface we tested was tarmac outside. The car traveled 5 of one of the children’s feet from the ramp.
The second surface we tested was the carpet in the corridor. The car traveled 6 feet in length.
The final surface was the wooden floor in the dinner hall. The car traveled a whole 10 feet!
Those of us who had predicted there would be the least friction between the car and the wooden floor were right! (Which was actually most of us).
As a final test, Miss Yarrow got us to test the amount of friction between the wooden floor and our shoes. We kept our shoes on and tried to skid on the ground. We couldn’t move very far. Some of us even made burn marks where the rubber on our shoes was too hot because of the friction. After this, we took our shoes off and tried the same thing but in our socks. We traveled further in our socks, showing that there was less friction between them and the wooden floor.
We all enjoyed learning about friction in this active way and we think Santa learned a lot too. The test we did made it easier to understand why cars can travel better on different surfaces.
