We have been doing further work on Electricity and after discussing electrical safety we wanted to find out how the power came into the school.  We went and found the power pole that had the school transformer on it then worked out where it would come into the building. Evidently the boiler house, it then went to the main fuse box in the cupboard in the corridor.

 

We dismantled lots of things! We just forgot to photograph them!

We looked at what the inside of a plug and wall socket to see what they looked like.  We opened up some electrical cable to see what the wires were like. We found out that most cables  in our houses are made of copper, but that silver is the best conductor of electricity. We use copper as it is cheaper. After taking apart an old power cable from a laptop we found that it was made of braided steel wire.

We made lots of circuits too, here we are testing our fans.

There was lots of investigative science . We wondered what would happen to a light bulb with a really long and short wire. We thought the short wired one would light up first (spoiler alert – we were wrong) we were amazed to see that it didn’t make a difference. the 3 metre wire and 0.3 metre wire lit up the bulb at exactly the same time.

 

 

We then wondered how long a wire would light a bulb from a battery. 3 metres worked… so what about 20 metres? Absolutely no problem at all! (Don’t worry about the table on its side.. it is being used for a STEM project!)

Oh and evidently it was Disco Wednesday.