Week 13 Blogpost

 

1. The big questions addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did.

•     Big question: How does a battery power a light bulb?

In the lab today, we began by presenting our anchoring activity lesson to our peers and listening to each other's examples. In table groups, we provided and received feedback to help give us suggestions on what is "warm" and "cool" about our lesson and the different things we should think about incorporating within our anchoring activity. This process helped me clarify any misunderstandings and gave me great ideas for different things that will help my lesson plan and benefit student learning outcomes. After finishing our presentations, the focus of the lab was shifted to build off our learning from the previous week's lab, which dealt with lighting bulbs on a circuit board while trying to create different structures, changing how bright or dim the light bulbs are. We talked with our table partners about last week's lab, discussing how we think each of the circuits works. We discussed how the current flows of electricity affect how bright a light is, where we found that the electric current is strong initially, but as there are more light bulbs and paths for the electric current to take, the brightness of the light bulb starts to become dimmer. We used the PhET simulator to go more in-depth and observe the specific current structures we made and observed last week. 

2. A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture. 

We worked with the PhET electric current simulator at the start of the lecture, and explored what happened to the battery and light as we increased/decreased the voltage and resistance, and noticed how the simulation changed. Increasing the resistance of the light bulb reduced its brightness, while increasing the voltage of the battery made the light bulb much brighter. Also, when expanding the voltage of the battery, it also increases the chance of the battery catching on fire. Then I learned why a paperclip can conduct electricity, while an eraser cannot. The difference is because in a paperclip, the charges are allowed to move freely across the atoms, while in an eraser, it's known as an insulator, where the negative charges are tightly held against the positive charge atoms, and are not allowed to move freely. I learned that the purpose of the battery is to act as a chemical reaction for the positive and negative charges, which is called a redox reaction that makes electrons pop off atoms. Batteries transfer the chemicals to the electrons in the wire and start making them move. Batteries do not have an extra charge and run out of charge over time; they actually have chemicals, and when that chemical reaction occurs, it's just pushing the electrons in the wire to move. Using the PhET Simulation, we then created a "parallel" circuit where we noticed that different parts of the wires have different currents, especially when the wire is separated into different directions, but when the wires join back together, the current increases. We used the analogy of rivers, "where two rivers are flowing and when they meet, there becomes more water in the river." I then learned the difference between a "parallel" circuit and a "series" circuit, where in a parallel circuit each bulb has a direct path to the battery and in a series circuit the battery electrons have to pass through one lightbulb and then another lightbulb, causing the lightbulb to be dimmer in a "series" circuit compared to a "parallel" circuit.