Hot Air Balloon

For our balloon, we glued together tissue paper to form the balloon, tying the top and leaving an opening at the bottom. We decided to use candles as our heat source, which would cause hot air to be forced through the opening in the bottom and cause the cool air to be forced out. This would in turn lift the balloon. In order to make the balloon more powerful, we melted 3 candles together, forming one big candle with 4 wicks twisted together. The link to the website we got our inspiration from is http://www.explorium.org/tissue_balloons.htm The balloons follows Bernoulli and Archimede's principles.

Science Reviews

The Buoyancy Game Show (Jeopardy)
This game was fun, but slightly easy. I was able to answer all but one of the questions correctly. It would be good, however, for a slightly younger age group. ***

The Buoyancy Mix & Match

This game, again, was slightly juvenile. It was an easy game where you needed to match the beginning of a statement about buoyancy with the end of the sentence. **

Sink or Float? Word Search

This was by far the most fun...I love word searches and this combines both science and games in a perfect combination! ****

Videos
This video does not work on my computer...sorry!

Little Shop Physics

The Head Expander and Shrinker were interesting. They really did work...if you were able to keep your eyes open the whole time. The Rubber Pencil experiment is a classic elementary school trick that would entertain me for hours as a 4th grader.

PHYSICS LAB

TIDAL SIMULATOR

1. Earth-Sun has greater gravitational pull than Earth-Moon.
2. Earth-Moon has greater tidal effect than Earth-Sun.
3. Moon had more of an effect because of (d) the two objects being close together is more important than having a strength of gravitational force.

TIDE LEVEL

The tides change as you go through various days and months, and the moon also changes. As a result, the levels of the tides varies accordingly.

GRAVITATIONAL FORCE
1. Gravitational force was greater at A because A is closer to the moon that point E.
2. The earth doesn't move towards the sun because of tangential velocity.
3. The radius has a big impact on gravitational force changing because it is the divisor and is a huge factor in the equation.
4. If the moon increases in mass, gravitational attraction and speed of the moon would increase.
5. If the earth decreases in mass, gravitational attraction and speed of the moon would decrease.

Critical Speed Lab

1. The critical speed is 29,500 m/s.
2. A speed greater than critical speed means that earth will go out of orbit.
3. A speed less than critical speed means that the earth will crash into the sun.

•Torque is a measure of how much a force acting on an object causes that object to rotate.
•A real life example: a wrench turning a lug nut
•On the wrench the pivot point is the lug nut itself. If the torque you exert is greater than the counter torque of the friction in the bolt, the bolt will rotate (tighten)

*I replied to Susan's & Bre's blog

Physics Torque Project

To see the torque project Alyssa and I created, check out http://sm-physics.wikispaces.com/