Cleaning pennies to make into the battery:
We pasted some old pennies together with some nickles with paper towels soaked in an electrolyte to make a series of cells. It made a voltage we could measure, but I don't think this really grabbed Zoe's imagination, so we moved on to other ideas.
We banged together some quartz crystals in the dark to show the piezoelectric effect. It turned out that her geodes made the brightest flashes of light. It was fun, but hard to document.
Then we played with a pile of iron filings and some magnets for a while. I was thinking maybe we could map out the magnetic fields, but it was a little too abstract for Zoe. She did manage to make the iron filings walk end over end over the card stock which was pretty cool.
We settled back on the idea of making little things dance with static electricity. The experiment uses a plexi-glass sheet on little feet, rubbed with wool.
Zoe sawing wooden feet for out experiment:
Zoe drilling holes in the plexi-glass sheet and the feet we made:
Zoe took this picture while we were washing up after the garage portion of our work. No idea where she gets her hammish nature...
Zoe charging up the plexi-glass plate with one of my wool socks:
Watching bits of paper dance in the static electricity. They really move around on their own more than I expected they would.
