The weather was terrible on Halloween and our power went out for a few hours. Mark and Evie were gone to vaulting/YMCA and Ian was still in bed, so Shane was awful bored without his screens. He has been reading about robots in his science and built one, but has been wanting me to buy more DC motors so he can build more robots without having to take apart his others. He realized on Saturday that he had a broken RC car and thought that maybe he could salvage some parts and do a little exploration...
...and what he found was more that what we imagined. Shane has been doing two different levels of science. One is electricity and magnetism and the other is robotics, conservation, and energy. He has gone through the electricity and magnetism a few times in our homeschool, but I really want him to more than understand the material.
And he pretty much made all the effort I've put into homeschooling worth it. Not only did he discover one DC motor, he decided there must be a second motor that drove the back wheels and found that one as well. He clipped the wires that attached the motors to the computer board knowing that whatever programming was stored there, he couldn't use. He stripped the wires himself to make longer leads. And then he tested to see if he could make the motors run by simply touching the leads to the ends of a battery.
He was a little disappointed at how slowly the motor ran, especially since the car seemed to drive so quickly in comparison. He then remembered that the battery case had four batteries, he was testing with only one battery, and when he was creating circuits with batteries, light bulbs, and aluminum foil in his science class, the more batteries he used, the brighter the bulb... so when he discovered the battery case was corroded (and probably the reason the car didn't work anymore) he figured out a way to arrange the four batteries so that he could make a circuit and run the motor faster. It worked!
Today, he reassembled various parts and made a two-wheeled contraption that runs on two batteries with pennies as conductors and tape holding it all together.
THIS IS WHY WE HOMESCHOOL!
