See-Saw Science Lab

On Thursday November 1, the 9^th grade at Calvary did a science lab. It was called See Saw Science, and we were split up into groups of two or three. With my partner Sami we got a meter stick, a rubber stopper, a handful of pennies, a 50 gram weight, and a paper where we could record our data.

Following instructions from our science books, we took the rubber stopper, and placed the meter stick top of it, where the stick read 55 centimeters.  This was our pivot point or fulcrum.   Next we took a stack of 8 pennies and the 50 gram weight and put both of them on the shorter side of the stick so that they weighed down that side of the stick, and wrote down the point the 8 pennies were at.

Next we took a stack of 5 pennies, and made a prediction of where we should place them on the other side of the stick, so that it was balanced out on both sides, and wrote it down. We placed them where we guessed, but it was too much, so we moved them down. We recorded the 5 pennies’ final position on our papers, and then found the distance the meter stick had pivoted by subtracting the 5 pennies’ final position from the fulcrum’s position. After that we multiplied the number of pennies on the shorter side of the stick by the distance the meter stick had pivoted. Then we recorded both those numbers.

We repeated the experiment four more times, each time with a growing
number of pennies. However, the 8 pennies always stayed the same. Every time we
did the experiment, our final number grew, but always stayed close to 200.

In this lab, I learned more about a simple machine that I’ve known about for as long as I can remember, and figured out a little about how some scales work.  Over all I enjoyed doing the lab and thought it was quite interesting.

            Christiana Evans, Freshman