Diary Entry - March

Both wind tunnels are now operational. Simon and Ken have introduced the children to using the equipment and reading data from the data logger. Children have used their experiences of organising data using a spreadsheet to contribute for the wind tunnel testing spreadsheet. There will be a lot of data to organise and it also needs to be moved around to create new tables for comparing how well each turbine is working. Each group has worked to create a flow diagram for the testing process and identified the independent and dependent variables by creating questions for investigation.

Children have been making good use of the blade angle setting jigs. The test begins by measuring the revolutions of the turbine from a standing start. Our slim line brake has been a plastic straw inserted into a hole in the flywheel. Simon is looking at alternative ideas as slowing the flywheel after tests restricts how quickly testing can be repeated.

The children are very quickly adapting to using the new equipment and working as teams to complete testing. Each test run will take about 2 minutes. They only need supervision when changing the blades on the test pylon.

Some groups have progressed to changing the number of blades. The configurations being 12, 6, 4, 3 and 2 blades. We only had some idea of how the performance would be different and a real sense of excitement and enquiry was evident during testing.

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