May the force be with you

This week the Year 3 and 4 classes learnt how to use a forcemeter to measure the force it takes to do different jobs.
This picture shows a forcemeter being used to see how much force is needed to do the job of lifting up a bucket of weights.

The forcemeter has a spring inside that is pulled down as force is applied to the object. The force is measured in Newtons (N) which is named after Isaac Newton.

We also tested how much force was need to...

• lift a school bag
• lift a shoe
• lift a cup
• open the door

Next we got to make our own forcemeters which we called Pull-o-meters. We had to be good at using a ruler to measure out each section.

Instead of using a spring our forcemeters use a rubberband. When the load is hung on the hook the rubberband stretches and we can read the scale to find out the amount of force being used.


Next we used our forcemeters to see if lifting, pulling or rolling a weight used the most force.
We found out that lifting used a lot more force that pulling or rolling. Our explanation for this is that when you lift something off the table gravity starts pulling it back down which makes it hard to lift. When you pull or roll something the object is being supported by the table.