Parents may want to review some of the things we are learning. You might learn some things too! It would be great if you asked the boys some questions about the material we covered below.
We began the session remembering The Creator:
Genesis 1:1 “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
Exodus 31:3 “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works…”
Let us remember to pray for wisdom.
Electricity: The movement of electrons or electrical charges through conductors.
We measure electricity in voltage and current. To understand these two measurements, compare a swimming pool 3 ft. high to a piece of garden hose 3 ft high, full of water and both of them having a valve and a water wheel at the bottom. If you measured the pressure in at the valve at the bottom of the pool with the pressure at the bottom of the hose, they would be the same. That is like the voltage. Think of volts like you think of water pressure. The higher the water in the pool, the higher the water pressure. The higher the voltage, the higher the electrical pressure. The bigger around the pool is, the longer it could power the water wheel.
What I have made here is battery towers for you to use for our projects. Each battery is made up of cells. We call them D cells, and dry cells, because they do not have liquid in them. There are eight cells in each battery. The chemicals in each cell make about 1 and a half volts of electrical pressure. So, eight cells makes 12 volts. The car battery also has eight cells, but they are filled with acid. This nine volt battery that I have broken apart has how many cells in it? Count them: (6).
A little AA dry cell battery also makes 1.5 volts, but the car battery is much bigger around, like a swimming pool, so it can make 1.5 volts of pressure a lot longer than the AA cell, and the D cell will last a lot longer than a AA dry cell.
Electrical current is a measurement of how many electrons can pass through a (conductor) wire in a second. We measure current in amps. One amp is a lot of electrons flowing each second. The number of electrons that pass through a wire having one amp is: 6241 000 000 000 000 000. That is a number about 6 plus 18 zeros!
Magnets:
Magnets are pieces of steel, or mixtures of stuff that have iron or other magnetic materials in them. Steel has iron in it, like the earth.
Magnets can be permanent magnets (like the earth) or temporary magnets, called electromagnets.
In magnets, the electrons inside the atoms are all lined up and this makes a force that we can detect and use. In permanent magnets the electrons are stuck in that position. In electro-magnets, the electrons line up with one another while an electric current is passing through a wire wrapped around the magnetic material, but when the electrical current stops, the electrons spring back to their original position. When they spring back to their original position, they generate an electrical current in the wire!
So, when we push electrons through a wire wrapped around a steel nail, for example, it makes the nail an electromagnet, and this electromagnet pulls on other steel or magnetic material. This is how motors and other stuff works.
But, when we remove electric current from the wire, the electrons in the magnetic material go back to their original position, and we use this fact to make electric generators!
Today, we will learn how some of these things can be illustrated in the projects we build.
Build telegraph sender (transmitter).
How long would it have taken this stuff to build itself into a telegraph sender? Did it take intelligence to make it happen or did it all happen by chance?
Samuel Morse:
Samuel Morse was a man who was born shortly after the USA ratified the US Constitution, born in 1792 and died shortly after the Civil War, in 1872 who loved art. He struggled to make a living at being an artist. He was a good artist, but artists always seem to have trouble making money. When he learned from a friend about electromagnetism, he could not get it out of his mind. I guess you could say he was an inventor. That’s often the way inventors live. Ideas keep them awake at night. He made many drawings or sketches of circuits that illustrated his ideas.
In 1837, Morse formed a partnership with Alfred Vail, who gave him money and helped him build a real telegraph sender. They got it patented, and in the Spring of 1844 they put up poles and strung a long steel wire between Washington, DC and Baltimore MD, and sent a message using Morse Code, that said, “What hath God wrought?” taking a verse from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), and giving the Creator the credit for what he had made. The rest of his life, Morse lived off money made by his invention.
Others had also made similar machines even before Morse, as you can learn by doing some research on the subject, but he is given credit for doing the most to make the telegraph a reality.
Let us always remember to give honor and credit to the Creator who made all these things and made it possible for us to use the things He made! He made the wood, the copper, the iron, the chemicals the batteries are made of, and the electrons, and current.
No comments:
Post a Comment