Static Electricity Unit

Throughout exploring about static electricity in science, I’ve been making new discoveries and also using the existing skills from past science classes to use in order to make larger discoveries and more complicated labs.

The most important lessons I’ve learned have been that certain materials carry certain charges. Prior to this discovery, I thought that certain materials could just carry bigger charges because of the friction it created, but now I’ve finally learned that some materials carry out charges differently.

Adding to that, learning that same charges repel has also been a key part of my learning of static electricity. I never knew that equivalent charges repelled, and I had never even wondered. This was an important discovery because of the different experiments I could now attempt to create a repelling soda can be much easier, rather than just randomly selecting different materials and rubbing them together in hoping they would repel the can.

And third of all, understanding insulators was a key part of understanding static electricity. Knowing that there are certain materials that can end the electric charge was very important to build a mini-circuit such as connecting arms and creating the circuit as we did in class.

In the early stage of our unit, we used electroscopes to discover the reactions of different materials with different charges. This lab allowed me to experiment with materials I haven’t messed around with too much and to discover the strength of certain material combinations that created a strong charge. It helped with the introductory discovery how everything worked, and generally gave me a better idea of what was going on with the charges and why everything happens the way it does.