Today we were visited by Dr Irene Wise from Lancaster University. We were looking at how to harness the power of the wind to make electricity. First we looked at different windmill types then we looked at what is a watt (100g being moved through 100cm in 1 second). We all moved a 100g mass to create 20 watts – this was quite tiring by the end of 2o seconds! Then we looked at creating our own wind turbine which we tested by seeing if it could move a metal weight through 1 metre – the challenge was to see how many weights we could put on the turbine. The record was 11 closely followed by two groups with 7. Finally we looked at how magnets spinning creates electricity and attached a circuit to our turbine to see if we could power an LED bulb – getting a constant flow of electricty to enable the LED to light up was tricky but a couple of groups managed it.
We had a great STEM morning and learnt so much about the different forms of energy and how wind turbines work.
Thank you Dr Wise and Lancaster University.
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