The Circuits class is continuing to work through the CASTLE curriculum. At the end of our last class and for the first part of today’s class, they worked on building air capacitors (and solving all of the materials problems involved in figuring out how to build them). I shared the diagram and instructions from the CASTLE teacher guide with them, and they figured out how to make it work with the materials we had. (Water bottles instead of jars, gloves instead of balloons, etc.) They went down to the robotics room and drilled holes in the caps of the water bottles that would fit straws.
Some of the attempts didn’t work (and those ones usually involved a lot of duct tape). Here’s one that worked well:
While making them, they started discussing why these were capacitors (without any prompting). We ran out of time to actually use them for the activity (so we will pick them back up next class), but I’m excited to see how building them themselves might affect their ideas about how they work.
In the second half of class, we took another quiz. It had another practical component to it (a little tougher than last time, but they were pretty well prepared for it).
O'Shea Physics 180 