Playing with Electricity

As a part of the grade 7 science curriculum students are expected to develop and display their understanding that fields exist between objects with mass, between magnetic objects, and between electrically charged objects that exert force on each other even though the objects are not in contact.  This requires students to draw on prior learning and experiences including the concept of forces in general, scientific principles such as conservation of energy, and various forms of energy they experience in their everyday lives.

Students explore electricity and magnetism, through a series of activities and explorations that include: measuring magnetic fields, building an electromagnet, conversions between energy types (including electrical potential to light, sound, and others).  By the end of this unit students will be able to model how interactions between objects that are not in contact with each other and predict how those resulting forces change the movement or behavior of both objects.

Particularly exciting for teachers is that students get to try out a variety of options in how they can show changes resulting from electromagnetic interactions, even if they end up burning out a lot of lightbulbs in the process.  This is just a smaller part of the larger unit on forces and energy and sets students up for success in the 8th grade unit on motion including Newton’s Laws and eventually in high school physics and Engineering classes.