This week, Crew Hamill have continued their expedition lessons by focusing on another force – air resistance. We looked at what air resistance is – a type of friction between air and another material – and looked at the impact this had on objects when they fell to the ground. We tested it out by dropping two pieces of paper (one flat and one screwed into a ball) and discussed which one would fall to the ground first. We then discussed why this might have happened. Together, we predicted the ball of paper would fall fastest as it was more dense and had a smaller surface area. We were then introduced to our mission from the National Space Station:

Using our design brief, we worked in pairs to design and create a parachute that could be tested for air resistance. We worked in mini crews to create these and then came together as a whole crew to test them out. We began by ordering the parachutes from biggest to smallest in order to test whether our prediction (that larger parachutes will take longer to fall to the floor as there will be more air resistance) was correct. We found that we were correct – the larger the canopy on the parachute, the longer it took to fall to the ground. However, there was one anomaly with a parachute that had been made with a thicker canopy and this effected the results slightly.

We loved conducting a fair test to investigate! Raza made an excellent scientist by being our constant variable and being the only one to drop each of the parachutes!

To begin part one of our lesson on friction, we recapped some of our prior knowledge and looked at the scientific vocabulary that we needed for the lesson. We then looked at what friction is and watched a video that detailed what life would be like without friction. Once we’d had some more knowledge of friction, we began part two of our lesson which focused on an investigation in which we looked at the effects of friction on a toy car. Before we began our investigation, we discussed as a crew what we thought might happen and came up with a crew hypothesis. We then conducted the experiment to see if our hypothesis would be correct. We used a wooden ramp and 4 different materials to test how far the car would travel on the different surfaces. We were happy to conclude that our hypothesis was correct! We found out that a rougher surface would produce more friction, meaning the car would travel a shorter distance and that with a smoother surface it would travel further as there is less friction.