Holy Bananas! (Unit Blog Reflection)

Holy Bananas this was a long unit! And boy was it fully charged and filled with energy!

It all started with charges.

Charges are passed along but never lost

Opposite charges attract each other

 like charges repel each other

 There are three ways to charge an object: by direct contact, friction, or induction.

We can use these nifty ways to explain why our hair sticks up after we pull on a sweater (other than: because my hair hates me).

The sweater rubs against your hair when you pull it over your head and steals electrons (that little thief). The sweater becomes negatively charged and the hair becomes positively charged. Because the positive charges want to repel each other (like a brother and sister fighting over the last oreo), your hair stands up in an effort to get away from itself.

And then things really get crackling.

It’s time for lightning (no, not grease lightning you broadway buffs.)

Lightning is created when friction charges the clouds. The ground is positive and the clouds are negative. The clouds and the ground will attract each other enough that a lightning strike occurs.

            *And lightning doesn’t go down like we see it, it actually goes up!

And those funky things called lightning rods? Yeah, they don’t actually attract lightning, charges just like to gather on pointy things so if the lightning strikes it will want to go there.

And from there we hopped on the wagon and found our way to Coulombs law

Coulombs law relates electrical force and distance

                        F=k (q1q2/d^2)

Then like a current through metal we zapped our way to Conductors and Insulators

A conductor is a material through which electrical charge can travel.

(like metal!)

An Insulator is a material that is a poor conductor of electricity

This half of the unit started out with a little thing called current, which is the flow of electric charge. The rate at which these particles flow is measured in amperes. One ampere is equal to one coulomb or charge per second.

                                    *Remember: Coulombs are the standard unit of charge

Generators and batteries can work to move these particles and separate opposite charges, therefore creating a difference in voltage.

                                    *Voltage=potential

                                                Voltage is measured in volts

It is also key to remember that charges flow through a circuit and that voltage is applied across.

But wait, there’s a new man on the workforce: Electrical Shielding.

BUT

We can only talk about shielding after we talk about electric fields

An Electric Field is the area around a charge that can affect another charge

* the lines on an Electric Field determine its strength, the closer the lines are to one another the stronger the field.

Phew, now we can get to the shields and medieval jousting. Wait… these aren’t those kinds of shields… darnit.

These shields, the electric brand, protect a negative charge from feeling any force when it is surrounded by positive charges because the positive charges repel one another.

That nifty concept is why all of our electronics are in metal cases. So the delicate balance of charges isn’t upset by your static-y sweater, metal casings act as electric shields.

Bum Bum Bum. Let’s talk about relationships. Nooo, not the awkward high school ones, ut the relationship between Resistance, Current, and Voltage.

It’s a love-hate triangle.

The labs from this unit taught us that current and voltage love one another, they’re directly proportional, whereas resistance and current, they don’t like each other as much, they like to go in different directions and are inversely proportional.

Or.

I=V/R

And if all those letters weren’t confusing enough, we hopped right into DC and AC current

DC stands for Direct Current

AC Stands for Alternating Current

This unit was a struggle for me, I missed a few days due to sickness and that really hurt me. I’ve kept up with my homework but I think coming in a few mornings a week would really benefit my grade. I did, however, find this unit interesting and I felt like I learned a lot about the world around me. All in all I faced some challenges and I didn’t effectively handle them. Next unit I will work to keep up not only with homework, but with general understanding as well.