Chain Reaction: Focus on science skills
Your class perfect their twenty-first century skills including collaboration and analytical thinking as they come together to create a chain reaction machine.
They’ll be supported to work scientifically, planning their creations, observing their operation, and making changes to meet their goals.
Students will be working scientifically to:
- Pay attention to objectivity and concern for accuracy, precision, repeatability and reproducibility.
- Evaluate risks.
- Ask questions and develop a line of enquiry based on observations of the real world, alongside prior knowledge and experience.
- Make predictions using scientific knowledge and understanding.
- Present reasoned explanations, including explaining data in relation to predictions and hypotheses.
- Evaluate data, showing awareness of potential sources of error identify further questions arising from results.
Physics
- Energy changes and transfers
- Simple machines give bigger force but at the expense of smaller movement (and vice versa): product of force and displacement unchanged
- Other processes that involve energy transfer: changing motion, dropping an object, stretching a spring.
- Using physical processes and mechanisms, rather than energy, to explain the intermediate steps that bring about such changes.
- Forces as pushes or pulls, arising from the interaction between 2 objects
forces: associated with deforming objects; stretching and squashing – springs; with rubbing and friction between surfaces, with pushing things out of the way; resistance to motion of air. - Non-contact forces: gravity forces acting at a distance on Earth.
- Opposing forces and equilibrium: weight held by stretched spring or supported on a compressed surface
- Forces being needed to cause objects to stop or start moving, or to change their speed or direction of motion