Week 12

This last week before Christmas we are doing some more testing on the magnets. We have burned a resistance of 100v (again) and it has burned again, this time with smoke, so we had to quickly turn of the power supply for safety. The magnet works pretty well though without any resistance, however it overloads to fast and we can only reach 5v, need to solve it thought....

With a resistance of 1000 and the one of 560 the magnet don't work at all so we weren´t able to solve it by using a higher resistance.

We are trying to use a new machine that can vary the amount of resistance, it will be better than trying all resistor (and we will not risk burning them). We are hoping that this doesn't burn either!

                                     (Burned resistor, as you can see, now useless)

Week 11

Today, the new criterias had been introduced to us, apart from the older ones. In this trimester we are going to do part of the experiment, colecting some of the data. We have been making some magnets today. The wire that we are going to use is a normal current cable composed of more or less 30 little wires joined together, as a result, a thicker wire.
We were able to to do some quick tests to our new magnets, and we haver realised that the power supplies overpowers too quickly, we have even tried to use a 100v resistor to make it work, but it started to smell like if it was burning, and in fact it seems it was...

Week 10

This week we are transforming our work into a word document. The work is already finished but we the format is not perfect, so we are improving it. The procedure has been changed a little bit too because we think that we will have some trouble measuring the electromagnetism because of the low power of it,
The final work has been sent. However, here is a link to see it.

Week 9

Today we are polishing our presentation in order to make it as good as posible. In our calendar we said that today we were going to finish criterion C and I, but we have already finished them.
We are also testing the power supply and the electromagnets to check that everything is working properly. Maybe we have to use some resistances because the power supply heats pretty fast and stops working.
Testing the magnet a resistance has melted...

Week 8

This week we are rewriting criterion A because we think that we can improve it a little bit. Secondly, we planned to add some information to criterion C, which is bibliograhpy. However, we don't need more resources right now so won't add more references at the moment.
We are modifying the procedure and background info as well because they aren't precise enough.
At last we are going to add a picture containing all materials that we will use.

Week 7

Last week we finished criterions B and D, just as we planned. However, it is possible that we make some changes in order to improve it. Today we are thinking about how to make a good presentation of the work. We are also improving the background info, which was certainly not good enough.
We started to make some experiments to check if the magnets are going to work. There has been some trouble with the voltage because the wire heated up really fast (we had no resistance) and therefore the current went up, causing the power supply to overload itself.

Week 6

Last week we had no class so we couldn't work in our project. This means that everything that we planned to do last week is what we are doing now. We are trying to finish criterions B & D. We have improved the quality of the bibliography, eliminating the resources that aren't going to be useful for us. We have also started to make the magnets, to start as soon as possible.

Week 4

Today we are going to revise and collect all the materials that we are going to use the next time. We had the nucleuses (which are going to be nails with different width) from before. Today we are also going to decide the width of the copper cable and the batteries that we will use.
We have finished our calendar from today untill the 15th of November. The procedure has been done and the background info has been partly done.
This is our calendar:

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We have finished criterion A:

"A. Formulación del problema de investigación.

. El problema de investigación está bien definido y se han identificado todas las variables pertinentes."

We have decided to investigate the factors that influence the power of a magnet. We are going to make different magnets and we will change one of the three variables of a magnet at a time.

 First we will change voltage leaving constant the diameter of the core and the number of turns of the copper and then we will make the same but changing the diameter of the core while leaving the rest of the constant controlled. Finally we will change the number of turns in the copper wire while leaving the rest constant.

Week 3

Firstly we have asked if it was any way to measure and change the voltage given to the magnet, the school has a power supply we can use in order to change it. We have reafirmed our procedure and started the previous investigation. We have created the outline of the written report. we have specified what are our task, hypothesis, materials and procedure and we also have decided which is going to be the format in which the results will be given.
We are going to do three experiments with three different independent variables (the thickness of the iron nucleus, the current/voltage of the battery, number of turn of the cable around the nucleus)
This is how the final electromagnets will look like:

(Cdn.instructables.com, 2014)

The link to the outline of our written report is here.

Week 2

Today we have finally decided what is our project going to be about. We are going to create different types of magnets, and we will compare the strenght of the magnets that we create to check which one are the most and least powerful ones.
Another thing that we are doing today is to plan what are we ging to do in each day (the time planning).

Week 1

Today we have been looking for ideas on the Internet for our project. We have seen different videos on YouTube because we want to do not only a good, but a funny task too. We have been thinking about a wide range of ideas, from making magnets or creating a magnetic canon towards calculating the explosivity of some elements in water. We are finally looking towards magnetism.