Science 9 – The above video is me going over a lab that the students had already performed. Sometimes I go over them again quickly to make sure we all have the same consensus on what happened.
Using capacitors in high school science in BC generally is not done. However, we are using them not to learn about time variant current characteristics, but to analyze the nature of charges in a circuit.
The insulator in the capacitor breaks our original model of complete circuits. We get a working circuit, yet we know that charges aren’t crossing through the capacitor. As well, a discharging circuit will light a bulb, so charges can’t originate from the battery. In fact, as shown in the video we must be able to reason that charges are everywhere in the circuit because the compass rotates in all parts of the circuit no matter where the capacitor is.
There is a lot more to say about this topic, but that’s the general idea. These are great activities for the students because it challenges them to reason through logical inferences. Fantastic!
BC Physics 180 