Maths and Science

Barbie Doll Bungee Jumping Into The Void

This week our Year 10 Mathematicians have been bungeeing Barbies from level one into the void!  Dangerous?  Yes!  But only to Barbie!!!!! 

To investigate the total amount of rubber bands needed for the bungee cord for their Barbie, the students collected data using one to six elastic bands. 

They then used this to construct a linear model and equation to mathematically predict the number of elastic bands needed for the 5.02m drop. 

It was rewarding to see the students collaborating about their findings and what the components of their equations meant, along with any potential errors.  Great work Year 10s.  An added bonus was that not too many of the Barbies had perished!

Core Maths Team

Physics

So far Unit 1 of Physics has been challenging yet engaging. Initially we covered the topic based on electric circuits. In this unit, many of the practicals that we constructed, involved testing the relationship of current, voltage and resistance in a circuit, which is a great contrast to theory any day. One of these experiments allowed us to visualise what we had learnt, where we constructed a circuit and viewed the brightness changes of a lightbulb between both parallel and series circuits (these are where two wires run parallel and rejoin or simply on one single wire). This experiment allowed us to visualise and identify trends which we had learnt through theory.

The latter topic we are currently studying is thermodynamics. Thermodynamics involves studying the effects of heat and temperature and the concepts of energy and work. Again, it has been a worthwhile topic learning about many concepts to do with heat and temperature. One of the beneficial practicals in this topic was when we designed our own experiment. Ours was to observe how the diameters of metals have an effect on the overall heat conductivity of the metal so we compared two aluminium and copper rods with two different diameters. We did this by heating them with a Bunsen burner at one end and measuring the temperature reached by the other. So far physics has been a good challenge to comprehend and understand the concepts. Who doesn't like a challenge?

Joshua Galland and Terence Mok