Does the size of a magnet determine it's strength?
Students have collected lots of understandings about magnets over the course of the past several weeks. They determined the following facts to be true:
Magnets have a north and south pole.
Magnets with opposite poles will try and connect to one another: attract.
Magnets with the same poles with push away from one another: repel.
Magnets have a magnetic field and objects made of nickel, iron or cobalt will attract to the magnet within its magnetic field.
Magnets that break each have a north and south pole.
Magnets won't attract to rubber, plastic, wood, paper, glass, brass, copper, and stainless steel.
The earth is a giant magnet.
Compass needles are attracted to the magnetic field of earth which is why they always point north.
Magnets have different strengths.
Magnets can be different sizes and shapes.
When discussing what we knew to be true, we discovered that many of us were still confused about whether or not the size of the magnet played a role in how strong the magnet was. In order to figure this out, I gave our students new magnets to test. We tested a new horseshoe magnets, a new bar magnet, a cube magnet and a dot magnet. Check out their procedure below:
After conducting this test, they were able to clearly see that the size of the magnet does not determine how strong it is. The strongest magnet was the dot magnet which pulled the paperclip on average at 6.6 cm compared to the horseshoe magnet which pulled the paper clip from 2.1 cm or the bar at 1.9 cm. The data doesn't lie!
