Exciting Experiments in Year 11 Physics

Students in Year 11 learned about the topic of Pressure in their Physics lesson by completing a series of revealing experiments. Some of the experiments demonstrated how astonishing large air pressure is: they discovered that air pressure is great enough to collapse an aluminium can and to shoot a ping pong ball across the lab! Students also investigated the Magdeburg Hemispheres experiment. Magdeburg Hemispheres are named after a former Mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, who first used them and a team of horses in 1648 to demonstrate the incredible power of air pressure. Although Year 11 couldn’t fit a team of horses in the lab, fortunately David and Norman were on hand to help with the demonstration. However, despite their best efforts, they could not pull the evacuated hemispheres apart: Air Pressure 1 vs David and Norman 0!

The lesson was very practical based, but students learning from home were still kept engaged in the lesson, as one of the students in the lab joined into the MS Teams call from their phone so that our online learners could still participate.