For the first time, Kenny had to conduct an individual project for the school's science fair. At Tim's age, he still does group projects. His class's project is on the five senses.Kenny wanted to do something with generators. He wanted to make his own electric generator but that's too advanced for second grade. "How would you follow that up next year, kid?!" (I don't even know if we have a soldering iron. Probably someplace!)
We have this hand-crank radio and I looked online for project ideas. We decided to measure how long the radio plays depending on how many times the crank is turned. Our guess was that more cranks would mean longer playing time.
We also wanted to understand the components of a simple electric generator (magnet, coil, crank), how those components work together to generate electricity and, rather than build one ourselves, use commercially available gadgets to demonstrate operation and prove our hypothesis that "turning the crank more results in a longer playing time."
Something we observed during our experiment is that raising the antenna increased playing time, as well. So we included that observation in our results: playing time isn't dependent exclusively on the number of cranks but also on whether or not the antenna is raised.
An online graph making tool available from the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the U.S. Dept. of Ed. was a simple way to plot and show our results.
If you'd like a closer, more detailed look, check out the image at flickr.
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