Science of Sound!

Sound starts with a simple vibration. When any object vibrates, it causes movement in the air particles. These particles bump into the particles close to them, which makes them vibrate too causing them to bump into more air particles. This movement called sound waves, keeps going until they run out of energy. If your ear is within range of the vibrations, you hear the sound. 

When learning about sound we have looked into the way bumble bees extract pollen from flowers by buzzing. A bumblebee grabs hold of a flower and vigorously shakes its body using its powerful flight muscles, not its wings. These vibrations cause pollen to be released from the flower and are propelled onto the bumblebees body. In some of the pictures below we used tuning forks to see how the vibrations move corn flour 'pollen' off of a balloon and cup 'flower'.

For digital technology we learnt about computational thinking which is a set of problem-solving methods that involve expressing problems and their solutions in ways that a computer could also do. We made our way through a 'super computer' and sorted out our tuning forks from highest pitch to lowest pitch. The way we did this was by tapping the tuning fork and listening to the sound it made. We compared this to our buddies tuning fork and decided which was higher or lower. We then followed coloured lines for the higher and lower pitch until we finally were sorted in order. 

Check out some of the sound experiments we have done so far!