Physics: Experiment 1

The children are a little young to fully understand physics, but it's not too early to lay the foundation for later comprehension. For Christmas Bentley received a physics science kit from great-grandma (chosen by his mom). He's been bugging us for weeks to use it, so last week I finally snagged the kit and the kids and we gave it a go. The first experiment was on the earth's gravity and how it affected falling objects.

We built a structure to dangle a plumb line so that we could determine the exact point an object would land if we dropped it from a specific point. The children are Lego masters, so building the structure should have presented no problem. Unfortunately the makers of the science kit gave no instructions on how to build the structure. They had one photo of it and it wasn't easy from that single perspective to figure out which parts to use and how exactly to connect them. B carefully counted the dots to get the pieces in the right place, but it still looked wrong. We had to do a few adjustments before it worked. Using the plumb line we learned that our school room table wasn't level, so we had to move our experiment to the kitchen counter. Finally we were able to mark the spot where the plumb line showed that a falling object should land.

The next step was to find two perfectly round potatoes, one half the size of the other. Unfortunately our potatoes were oval so I had to try and carve them down to round potatoes. Any lopsidedness in the potato would cause it to rotate as it dropped and then it would not land in the spot the plumb line had marked out. We had positioned a match stick sticking straight up at that spot and the potato was supposed to impale itself on the match stick. (We had a discussion about impalement and Vlad the Impaler--AKA Count Dracula.)

The children were supposed to hold the potato at a certain height above the match stick and then release it so it fell straight down. The children had a hard time releasing the potato without pushing it slightly causing it to miss the match stick. I was able to drop the potato so that it was impaled on the match stick, but of the three children only Bentley was able to get the trick of dropping the potato without pushing it out of alignment. 

The goal was to show that the twice as large potato impaled itself twice as deep on the match stick. It did! The experiment was a success. The children were entertained. I'm sure they understood the mass versus weight discussion that we had. Uh-huh.