Session 2 of our Science Fair experiment to build a vacuum cleaner was all about design and building.
With our materials gathered we first set about drawing how we think the vacuum cleaner will look in terms of a simple electricity circuit.
We learned that for a circuit to work, the loop must be closed.
We started simply and made our first circuit to simply make the motor spin.
Once we had our motors spinning, we experimented making different fans using paper and card. When the fans spin, we learned that if the battery was connected to the motor one way, the fan would spin in one direction, and if we changed the motor connections and swapped them, the fan would spin in the reverse direction. This is important to us as it is the difference between the fan blowing (like a hairdryer) and the fan sucking (like a vacuum cleaner).
Next we inserted more complexity into our circuit – we inserted a switch so we could turn our vacuum cleaner on and off.
Once happy with our circuits, Ms Phelan gave us a “motherboard”. A motherboard is a piece of plastic that we can use to hold all of the components of our circuit in place. We used screws and a screwdriver to fix all our components in place.
So that’s where we finished session 2. We all got our circuits complete. In the next session we will add the net and bottle and test our designs to see if they work!
