Teachers TryScience

Balloon Powered Toy Car

Sep 20 2016

Source: vascsc-tts-guj

Summary Information

Keywords:

Balloon, Newton’s law.

Topic:

Physics

Workplace Skills:

Raising Questions

Secondary Research

Discussion

Estimated Time Required:

less than 1 hour

Target Grade (Ages):

Grade 5 (Ages 10-11)

Grade 6 (Ages 11-12)

Grade 7 (Ages 12-13)

Tab Wrapper

LESSON

Goals and Prerequisites

Goals:

To motivate children to understand scientific principles through hands on activities.
To make interesting science models using simple and easily available materials.

Instructional Objective(s)

To demonstrate Newton’s third law of motion

Instructional Resources

Background:

A force is a push or a pull that acts upon an object as a result of its interaction with another object. Forces result from interactions! According to Newton, whenever objects A and B interact with each other, they exert forces upon each other. When you sit in your chair, your body exerts a downward force on the chair and the chair exerts an upward force on your body. There are two forces resulting from this interaction - a force on the chair and a force on your body. These two forces are called action and reaction forces and are the subject of Newton's third law of motion. Formally stated, Newton's third law is:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Materials:

Cardboard sheet , Straws, Wooden stick, Wheels with hole in the middle, Rubber bands, Cellotape, Balloon

Procedure:

Procedure

Push a wooden stick through a thick straw and place the two wheels on both the sides of the straw. Put rubber bands on both sides of each wheel so that the wheels could not come out of the stick. Prepare one more arrangement as above one. Stick both the straws with wooden sticks using tape on the cardboard leaving some gap between them. On the opposite side of the cardboard, stick another straw with balloon as shown in the figure. Blow the balloon and let it go.

How it works

Balloon powered toy car rely on Newton’s Third Law of motion. According to this law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that for every force there is a reaction force that is equal to it but opposite in direction. Here, as the air rushes out of the balloon in the backward direction it pushes the car in the forward direction with an equal force.

Assessments and Rubrics

Use different shapes of cardboards eg. Triangular shaped cardboard and observe if there is any difference in the speed of toy car.