Happy New Year!

Whilst learning about Greek temples last term, we pondered on how giant columns of marble would have been moved up hills. This has inspired out next topic...

We made a huge list of everything that moved. This was sorted into alive and not alive, before we thought about what makes things that are not alive move. Gravity, upthrust, electricity and wind, were some of the thing we came up with. Most vehicles have wheels. Reference books told us this week that primitive wheels would have been made from tree trunks rolled underneath objects. Wheels reduce the amount of friction between surfaces, making movement easier. To show how reducing friction allows things to move more freely, we did a fair test.

To make sure results are reliable, only one thing can change in a fair test. Everything else must stay the same, and the same thing must be measured each time. Each group could see that adding wheels to a vehicle allowed it to travel further. There was some confusion over whether we were measuring speed or distance, and working in groups of four was difficult for some. One of the most important aspects of being a scientist, is thinking about how to improve tests to make the results more reliable, so we did the test a second time and used force meters to measure the amount of force used to make the vehicles move. The write ups the pupils completed were very impressive. We will be doing another fair test soon.