Marbles passing from tower to tower

This session introduced the notion of harmonics, frequency, oscillation, triangulation and, of course, solving problems. We talked about the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure , particular thanks to Mr. Hamshaw and we looked at a glass being broken with sound.
Homework - go home and try singing to a wine glass ... loudly and highly pitched... or simply run your finger lightly around a slightly dampened rim of a wine glass.. you s
hould hear the harmonic evidence of ocillating frequency. See video here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECNDpCYvaOc

Next meeting not until 5th May - happy Easter form Mr. Geekie and the team.

see video here
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/demoweb/demomanual/acoustics/effects_of_sound/breaking_glass_with_sound.html

Structures - continuing scientifically to explore shapes

We built and destroyed paper structures to see which were the strongest.

More pictures from first structures session

Structures, hexagons, compasses, honeycombes, tessellations and.... dandelions

What an interesting session this evening.

We are starting a new topic which involves exploring structures. We talked about why a dandelion remained standing upright even when high winds had blown down fences, more about this next week.
We explored how to create a hexagon using a compass, and we built a large honeycomb which we then tested by standing on it. A really good introduction.
Tension and compression in a column was examined and our homework was to look up the word CONTRAFLEXURE and think why this could be relevant to a column under stress / loading.