Dr. Malachy's Flashes and Bangs

Dr. Malachy Thompson is a chemist.

He came to visit us today to show us how interesting science can be.

He taught us a little about energy and forces:- we saw a balancing bird,

 saw magnets attracting and repelling
and looked at white clothes and teeth under UV light.

He also showed us some amazing chemical reactions:- he filled a canister with 30% Buthane, let it react with Oxygen and explode when a small electrical charge was applied.

We saw how to make elephant's toothpaste!

and best of all.....we saw how to make hydrogen,

 

and what happens when this hydrogen explodes (so impressive!)

We are all determined to be wonderful scientists now!!

A huge Thank You to Dr. Malachy.

Building Bridges for Engineers Week

Yesterday on our Engineering-I-Spy-walk around Renmore we spotted a nice bridge that we are sure was designed by an engineer.

Today we had a look at lots of different types of bridges.

We were interested to see that lots of these bridges had triangles (or triangular struts) to make them stronger.  After building our houses from toothpicks yesterday we know that triangles DO make structures stronger.

We decided to make our own bridges and then to test and see how strong each bridge was.

We all used the same base (the boggle boxes) and one sheet of A4 paper each.

We were allowed to fold the paper in any way we liked.

We tested the bridges by putting coins on top.

We had to see how many coins we could stack on the bridge before it collapsed.

We think 28 was the most!

Biodiversity with Rory

Rory came to our class today to tell us all about diversity in Galway.

It was a really interesting talk and we learned so much.

We also went outside to have a look in Renmore to see how many different kinds of animal and plant species we could spot.

Here are some of our copies after our  wonderful biodiversity day: