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

 

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