Have you ever wondered how cranes can lift such heavy things? Their pulleys really help lighten the load. In this activity, have a play with some pulleys. These simple machines can make heavy weights as light as a feather!
Put one bobbin onto the chopstick.
Put the water bottle directly under the chopstick, and then run the string up and over the bobbin.
Pull down on the string. This will lift the water bottle off the ground!
Thread a bobbin onto the short string, and then tie it in a loop around the handle of the water bottle. Knot it in place.
Run the long string through the bobbin on the bottle, and then over the bobbin on the chopstick.
Pull down on the string. Was it easier to lift the bottle this time? Did the bottle move as fast?
You can add more bobbins to make your pulley more powerful. For a three bobbin system, tie one bobbin to the bottle and put two on the chopstick. Tie the long string to the bottle, then thread it around one chopstick bobbin, through the bottle bobbin and finally the second chopstick bobbin. Before you lift the bottle, make sure your string isn’t tangled.
A four bobbin pulley set has two bobbins on the chopstick and two on the bottle. Tie the long string to the chopstick, not the bottle. Can you work out how to rig it? You can keep adding more and more bobbins, but it might get tricky to prevent tangles!
In this activity, you’re making a simple machine called a pulley set, or a block and tackle. These machines are often used to lift things. They can be found in lots of places, from cranes and sailboats to elevators and exercise machines.
Pulleys aren’t just for show. A block and tackle can make heavy things easier to lift, as they make a small force stronger. With a big enough block and tackle, you could use a small rock to lift a boulder!
But you don’t get energy for free. In this activity, as you add pulleys, the bottle moves slower. There’s a mathematical rule that goes with this. If you halve the force to move something, then you double the distance you pull the rope.
In the end, it uses exactly the same amount of energy to get the load moved. So if you want to lift a boulder with small rocks, you’ll need a lot of small rocks (or one rock falling a very long way)!
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29 July, 2018 at 10:05 am
Thank you for this excellent activity.
The Foundation and Year one students at St Joseph’s in Hawthorn are looking at Toys in the concept SYSTEMS.
We would be very grateful for any other suggestions you might have to help the students understand the workings of TOYS.
30 July, 2018 at 9:33 am
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your note! I’m not a teacher, so I’m not sure how helpful this is, but here are a couple of quick thoughts…
You could get a whole bunch of spinning tops and see which ones spin easiest, spin longest, which ones will keep spinning when you throw a ping pong ball at them, that sort of thing. get everyone to describe them – how heavy are they, what colour, how tall, how wide, try and describe them at perfectly as possible. Some kids might find them hard to spin, though.
You could set up dominos and knock them over – get a good idea of chain reactions. There are lots of cool videos on the internet to watch too. It’s pretty easy to knock them over accidentally, though.
Make your own snakes and ladders game? They have to design the board, make the playing pieces, maybe even make the dice by putting masking tape on cubic blocks and drawing on dots? Or just print out a board off the internet, grab some counters and dice and let them play themselves – and if there are some kids who finish quickly, get them to change the rules or change the board or something.
Anyways, these might be too hard or boring or just no good, but I hope you find something useful here!