Year 8 Physics Trip
On Friday 26th January ten Year 8 students went to Oxford University on a physics trip. We did three main activities. The first one was called ‘super salad spinners’. In this, we learnt about particle accelerators and built a mini accelerator from a salad bowl and some metal tape. Two strips of tape in the bowl were charged negatively and two positively. A ping pong ball with a special coating would then get a positive charge and be attracted to a strip of negatively charged tape and then get a negative charge, and so be attracted to positive tape. As this repeats the ball goes around in a circle; our ball went around twice. In the other activities we carried out a lot of practicals, and saw demonstrations, about electrostatics. These included Van de Graaf generators, charging by rubbing and splitting a flame using charged metal plates. During the day, we were given marks for filling in workbooks and our contributions. At the end, we had a presentation and Handsworth Grammar School were narrowly beaten into second place out of the eighteen schools that went. The trip was great fun and taught us a lot about physics.
Eisa Yacoob
