May the ‘Force’ Be With You

Y5’s Science Day was all focused around forces. We first started off by designing a suitable parachute that would protect an egg dangling in a cup from the parachute. We had to think about the size of the parachute, the shape and the length of the strings, resulting in the parachute falling slowly so that on impact with the ground the egg would be protected. Some of us were successful, others unfortunately had ‘a cracking time’! We learnt that the larger the surface area of the parachute, the greater the air resistance, hence the slower the fall of the parachute.

We then investigated friction on jelly cubes, moving them from plate to plate using chopsticks and timed ourselves. Oil was then added and the investigation repeated. We discovered it was much harder to grip on to the jelly cube due to the oil causing less friction between the jelly and the chopstick. We had fun trying though and became quite competitive!

Water resistance was our next experiment, investigating the effect of water resistance on the shape of an object dropping through water. Again we discovered that the bigger the surface area of a shape, the greater the surface area and the slower it falls through the water.