Static Electricity – Virtual Science Space
Static…It’s Electric!
Our next simple science week video explores electricity…the STATIC kind!
What is it? How do we generate it? If we told you your body could act like a battery and be charged….. would you believe us? Well, let’s TRY it and find out!
All you need for today’s experiment is a balloon, your hair and an empty soda can. Enjoy!
What you need:
- A balloon
- Head with hair
- Empty aluminium can
FACEBOOK LIVE RECORDING
FULL EXPERIMENT VIDEO SCRIPT
[JOH] Hi everyone, my name is Joh, and I work here at Science Space. Today we’re going to be doing a bit of a science demonstration that you guys can do at home. It looks like magic, but there’s something a little bit interesting going on here. So first things first, you’re going to need a balloon, you’ll need a can, it needs to be aluminium and empty, we’ve drunk all the coke out of this one. You’ll also need something to blow up the balloon, at home you can probably just use your lungs, we like to use these balloon pumps. So i’m just gonna blow the balloon up.
Now guys if you find it a little bit tricky to tie balloons, make sure you get your favourite adult to come and help you. It took me a long time to learn how to tie balloons, and get it right. Still don’t know if I’m doing it the best way. Now what we’re gonna do is we’re going to make some static electricity. You guys may have played with this at home before. I’m gonna show you, for those of you who haven’t, what it looks like, and I’m gonna need some help, so Paris do you wanna come on in? Paris has sacrificed her hair for us, so what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna rub it on her hair, and you can see that the hair kind of gets attracted to the balloon. Awesome. Now what we can do with all the electricity that we’ve built up on this balloon, so we’ve kind of made all of the electrons, so they’re like little tiny particles that are charged that whizz around in our atmosphere and everywhere, we’re going to line those up so we have a negative charge. We’ve got a buildup of charge on the balloon, and metals really like that buildup of charge.
So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna attract this, and get it to move, using the electricity that we’ve made on our balloon. Your hair looks lovely. No wait, come back! So what i’m gonna do, oops, come back, let me try that one again. Okay, now this may take a couple of goes. Nope. Oh, it’s moving! There it goes, there it goes! And there we go! Thank you so much guys, if you do try this one at home make sure that you tag us on Instagram and on Facebook, we’d love to see your re-creations. Bye!
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VIRTUAL SCIENCE SPACE
Virtual Science Space is our offering to the community during these challenging times. We are aiming to help all aspiring scientists, engineers and STEM lovers alike to continue their STEM learning at home.
Using our amazing STEM Team made up of real-life scientists, science students and aspiring educators to we have videoed awesome experiments, fantastic demos (that come directly out of our LIVE science shows) and put together some maker challenges for you and your children to do together at home.
As the COVD-19 situation is evolving at a rapid speed, we have done our best to quickly create these materials. As such, we have not edited ANY of these videos, and we ask that you please be understanding. All videos will have closed captioning available via our YouTube channel.
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