In this Rosie Labs guide you will find:
- Productive struggle opportunities for students during their project build,
- Lesson objectives and concept overview,
- Optional STEM topic video to share with participants,
- Step-by-step instructions and an overhead build video of the Rosie Riveters’ Flying Magnetic Art Project,
- Optional STEM activities to further explore the objectives and concepts used in the project build.
Objective
Understanding the relationship between magnetic poles and magnetic fields. This lesson serves as a a good basis to exploring electricity in subsequent lessons.
Concept Overview & Experiment Inspiration
Magnetism is an invisible force in which the movement of electrical charges causes magnetic objects to either attract towards each other or repel away from each other. There is a magnetic field that surrounds each of our magnets with positive and negative charges. Charges that are opposite, meaning a positive charge connected with a negative charge, will attract or pull magnetic objects together. If they are close enough, two magnets will even jump towards each other! This force is called magnetic attraction. Magnets with the same charge, for example, positive connecting with positive charges, or negative connecting with negative charges, will repel, or not want to touch.
Magnets have two sides (or poles) —a north pole and a south pole, which are on opposite ends, just like the North and South poles on the globe. Two south poles will never stick together, and neither will two north poles, because they are being repelled. A north pole will stick to the south pole of another magnet, because they are attracted to each other. [Have students say “opposites attract and same sides repel” as a group in a few funny voices.]
All magnetic objects are made of metal, but not all metals are magnetic! Ferromagnetism is a property of metals like iron, cobalt, and nickel. These metals have a magnetic field around them. The most common magnetic metal is iron. Students can use the magnets in their kits to investigate whether different objects in their classrooms are ferromagnetic or not.
Science Goals
- Physics is the study of matter and energy and their interactions in the physical world.
- In physics, we study forces. Forces are natural influences that cause changes in motion in an object.
- Some forces, including gravity and magnetism, can cause objects to move from a distance
Vocabulary
Magnetic Field – A space near a magnet where a physical field occurs from a moving electric charge that creates a force on another moving electric charge
Attract – to draw by a physical force causing or tending to cause objects to approach, adhere or unite; pull
Repel – the physical force of objects moving away or apart from each other
Ferromagnetism – A substance that has a high susceptibility to magnetization, the strength of which depends on the applied magnetizing field. Iron is an example of a ferromagnetic object.