Project TNT-Wk1

A Saturday club for young people-exploring things in and around the harbour

Our Saturday club is helping young people to explore the properties of water in a scientific but friendly and semi-structured way. The session begins with ice breaker sessions followed by Harbour Run-around in the sports hall to introduce some key words including: salty, fresh, brackish, tide, river, estuary.

The session content is led by the participants and volunteers. Overall we are exploring some of the weird things we can do with water as we start to explore the oceans. There are still spare spaces!

Penny drops

How many drops of water can you fit on a penny?

Does it make a difference if you have it ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ side up? We managed to get 24 drops onto the heads side and around 15 drops onto the tails side.

We wiped some soap over the surface and repeated our tests. The water drops spread out over the penny and we could drop about 3 drops before it spread over the edges.

Changing the density of water

We did some magic tricks and balanced hot water on top of cold coloured water. When we tried the same trick with cold water on top of the hot water it mixed up straightaway.

We made up three pots of water and salt mixtures with different amounts of salt in the pots and added some different coloured food colouring. By carefully adding the different coloured water into a tube, we could keep the colours separate.

Density and sinking

We made divers in bottles of water. We used a small piece of bendy straw and a paperclip to keep it bent over then trapped the air inside the straw with some plasticine. We added more plasticine and tested if the diver would float in a bowl of water. We then dropped the diver in a water bottle, topped it up to the top and put the lid on. When we gently squeezed the bottle the diver sank to the bottom. This was because as we squeezed the bottle the volume of air inside the diver was squashed making it denser than the water so it sank.

Notes: 

Project TNT is held at Somerford Youth centre on Saturday mornings from 10:00 to 12:00. There are at least four DBS checked adults present and young people volunteering as part of their Duke of Edinburgh Award. To attend contact Jae Harris of CAYP 07785 935928