Most groups today got their penny/washer/vinegar battery to work today, creating enough voltage to power an LED. I had a big moment of pride for my students seeing their hard work. This and the pencil-lead lightbulb project reminds me of watching MacGyver (I am a child of the 80s) making useful items out of everyday items. 
Tag: battery build
Ok bad pun, today we worked on figuring out how many cells will be needed to build a battery that will light a LED that needs 2.5V. Observations of our materials before (and after) and reassessing our work was key to being successful.
Students worked together to find out if there were “rules” for maximizing voltage of a system. Will use this in their investigation of creating a series of voltaic cells that will perform a task of lighting a LED later this week. 
After investigating different electrode/electrolyte combinations, we began a discussion about building our battery. The goal will be to have enough cells in our battery to power a LED.
This share & compare exercise was an excellent way to discuss in context, magnitude, electric potential, and connecting with our prior class investigation, building an incandescent lightbulb.
I’m very excited to see how the students do making their battery next class.
Today we looked at the materials at hand we had to do some work to find the best combination of materials. Students worked with pennies, galvanized washers, and vinegar to create voltaic cells.
Somehow the month of October has come and gone!
Today we are working on a new build, “Building a Battery from Everyday Objects” Students prepped one of the materials for this build recently, and we discussed the process and the observations that they made during the process. These qualitative observations will then lead into our discussion of chemical reactions.
Then after whiteboarding their observations we created a group document in Google Docs, allowing students to go back and reflect on observations that they either missed or failed to initially document.
