Session Seven - Saturday 24th March 2012

Spring has sprung in ESIP and it was a warm and sunny Saturday morning for Session Seven and a day devoted to science.

Today we learned about aerodynamics and streamlining. We looked at how air moves around an aeroplane’s wing and literally creates ‘stream lines’ and how these can be modelled and used to help design vehicles by showing the direction in which fluid will travel. We learned that drag is a frictional force caused by turbulence and we watched a falcon fly to see aerodynamics in practice.

The first experiment involved an experiment with plasticine shapes and a long tube of water to test the speed at which different objects moved through the fluid (water). We worked out how to make it a fair test – always having shapes with the same mass, keeping conditions the same (e.g. dropping the shape with the same amount of force) and worked out which was dependent and independent variables. The girls worked in groups and wrote up the experiments and drew graphs to determine the most streamlined shape – the one which moved through a given distance of water in the tube in the shortest possible time.

Miss Sym and Mr Watson, ably supported by Miss Christu, devised a far from elementary experiment involving the now infamous Forest School Wind Tunnel. Our Emerging Scholars were set a challenge to take an awkward shape and make it aerodynamic by minimising the drag. To make things more interesting we added constraints around budget (the girls had to buy materials to modify their shape), teamwork (they had to work in teams of four or five and ensure everyone had a role and was contributing) and innovation (the design needed to be original).

The designs were then testing in the Forest School Wind Tunnel and the girls gave presentations on why they had created their design the way they did and how successful they thought it was. There were awards for Most Aerodynamic, Innovation, Most Cohesive Team, Most Economic and a special award for the Biggest Catastrophe during the challenge. The group winning the latter award were least pleased about their success!

The day ended with Reflection Time and ideas about what we will do for the End of Year Event. That’s all from ESIP for this term so we wish everyone a Happy Easter and a enjoyable holiday. There are sixty three days until the next ESIP session so we set a challenge to develop a new ‘habit’ in that time. We look forward to the results.