This afternoon we carried out another experiment as a part of our study about magnets. This experiment was investigating the strength of magnetic force.
Then we tied a paper clip to a piece of string which we cellotaped to the table. We slid the string through the tape until the magnetic force was strong enough to attract the paper clip and hold it upright on the piece of string.
We began by cellotaping a magnet to a ruler and holding it between heavy books, so that it was hanging over the table.
We then began to experiment with the strength of the magnetic force. We decided that we could try to break the force by putting things between then magnet and the paper clip.
It was very cool to watch and we observed that the magnetic force actually made the paper clip shake a tiny bit.
William tries a piece of paper...Regen tries a laminated piece of cardboard….
Alex is sure that the plastic role, filled with all of its bits of paper, will break the force, and Rylee tries to put her hand in the gap. Izack even tries to use a shelf out of the library corner, and Regen thinks the great big modeling books will, but.....no, none of these objects caused the magnetic force to stop.
Chaleece slides the wooden metre ruler into the gap, and Emma slides our class novel 'Biddy Alone' in, but the paper clip stays in its place.
Rylee sees what happens if you put two pieces of chalk in between, and Elliot puts three laminated cards in between....still no change!
Jess tries two foam maths shapes...... Jaxon tries a large plastic maths shape......
Adam tries a wooden hundreds board…. Fraser tries a large foam square….
......no change.
Sam tries a thick chapter book and Izack tries a round plastic counter.
The boys felts quite certain that there was no way possible the magnetic force would be strong enough to work when they put two hundreds boards together and put them in the gap.....you can see their shock and amazement when the force continued to work.
What we found interesting about this experiment was, if we shifted the paper clip further away from the magnet (by even a mm) the force was broken and the paper clip fell - this meant that we could not make the gap between the paper clip and magnet any bigger to try things that were thicker. We were amazed that when the force was lost with such a small shift in distance, that it remained so strong with things put in between and could not be broken.
The magnetic force is very strong and nothing that fitted in the gap could break the force.
Things to try in the future:
creating a bigger gap so that you can try fatter things - we think the force could be broken, but the gap needed to be bigger to stick fatter objects in.
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