7. April 2020

Small batteries – big fun: a FCHgo lesson in Poland

This article about the FCHgo pilot classroom activities brings us to Poland.
Janek, primary school pupil in Ośniszczewko, tells us what he learned about the “Volta battery” during one of the FCHgo lessons held at his school.

Report by Janek Rakszawski, 1st class, Ośniszczewko, Pomerania-Kujawy, Poland (with help of Ms Kasia)

I  live  in a small village (Ośniszczewko), just in the middle of Poland. With our teacher, Ms Kasia, we started to discover the story about hydrogen from studying “batteries”. Ms Kasia said that we should call it “Volta battery”. We knew that batteries are used everywhere, but we never asked ourselves, how they worked.

In our lesson (06/11/2019) we explored batteries with our “hands on”. The use of a “Volt-meter” is not difficult. It is written “V” on this, and Ms Kasia helped us to switch it on and insert cables. The rest we did ourselves.

   

  1. Sebastian screwed-in a small bulb and connected wires. When I connected my wires to the battery, the lamp illuminated. Vow!
  2. In the meantime the girls were trying to measure the “Volt-age”. I helped them keeping the Volt-meter. One must always help them!
  3. Also the girls decided to switch on the lamp. But they used a wrong battery! Not all batteries can illuminate the lamp. They took a big battery but it was not enough energy.

Ms Kasia told us, that the small, flat battery that I used is a triple battery – three smaller put together like in a pile!

  1. Sebastian played with a small turbine that Ms Kasia called “dynamo”. He pressed the knob and the lamp illuminated. When he stopped, the lamp went off again.

Ms Kasia said: “Bartek used his energy to produce the electricity, and the electricity is also energy, so the lamp illuminated because it got energy”. Ms Kasia said that the word “energy” is very important.

  1. She also said that soon we will not use cars which produce smoke but cars with batteries like we played, but bigger.

She said that these batteries will not contain the heavy (and poisonous, she said) metal called lead but a very light (and invisible) gas called hydrogen. We like hydrogen.

We trust her. She is our Ms Kasia!

You would like to try out yourself the experiment Janek and his classmates conducted? Check out this guide for experiments, exploring volta’s batteries: English, Italian, Danish, Polish