Are you studying the scientific ideas behind various forms of energy in your classes? Do you want to conduct hands-on activities with your kids to bring your energy lessons to life? Why not consider including some Energy Science Experiments in your lesson plan?
Using experiments, you may genuinely involve your kids in understanding various types of energy. It allows learners to engage and participate in the course, adding an interactive component.
Potential and Elastic Energy
1. Rubber Band Stretching
Rubber bands are great illustrators of elastic energy because of their extensibility. Students participate in this exercise by stretching and releasing rubber bands to observe the correlation between the amount of strain and the subsequent distance traveled by the band.
Learn more: The University of British Columbia
2. Rubber Band Car
In this elementary grade level project, students construct a vehicle propelled by a rubber band's force. Winding the car's axle stretches the rubber band, storing potential energy. The car's potential energy turns into kinetic energy when the rubber band is released.
Learn more: Scientific American
3. Paper Airplane Launcher
Students will create a rubber band-powered launcher for paper airplanes that will use the elastic energy of a rubber band to send them soaring. The youngsters learn how using the hand and arm to launch an aircraft is different from using a rubber band launcher.
Learn more: My Baba
4. Catapult made on popsicle sticks
Elementary grade level kids construct a basic catapult in this exercise using recyclable materials, craft sticks, and rubber bands. When you push down on the launching stick, it stores up potential energy, much like an elastic band would do when you stretch it. The energy stored in the stick is transformed into kinetic energy when it is released.
Learn more: Little Bins for Little Hands
5. Chain Reaction of Popsicle Sticks
Learners gently weave wooden sticks together in this project, ensuring each piece flexes. The twisted sticks are maintained in position and store potential energy. The free stick snaps back to its usual shape when the first stick is released, converting elastic energy to kinetic energy.
Learn more: Clearway Community Solar
Gravitational Energy
6. Acceleration and Gravity
Using cardboard tubes, students study the link between drop height and object speed in this assignment. Gravity increases an object's speed by 9.8 meters per second (m/s) when it is in free fall. Students test the effects of gravity by timing how far a marble slides down a cardboard tube in one second, two seconds, etc.
Learn more: Science Sparks
7. Gravity modeling
In this activity, students study how gravity functions in the solar system using a broadsheet, a pool ball, and marbles. Using a pool ball for the Sun and marbles for the planets, students test the gravitational force of the Sun's mass and attraction.
Learn more: Science Learning Hub
8. Maneuvers Using Gravity Assist
This lesson explores how a gravity assist or "slingshot" maneuver might help rockets reach faraway planets. Students study the elements contributing to a successful slingshot movement while simulating a planetary encounter using magnets and ball bearings.
Learn more: Science Learn
Chemical Energy
9. Colors of fireworks
In this chemical energy lesson, students test how fireworks colors relate to chemicals and metal salts. Because of the chemical energy they generate, various chemicals and metal salts burn with varying light hues.
Learn more: ThoughtCo.
Light Energy
10. Reflecting light off a CD
Ever wonder why CD light reflects a rainbow? Your kids probably have too. This project explains to kids why and how light energy works. It's a wonderful way to bring science outdoors.
Learn more: Twinkl
Nuclear Energy
11. Observing Nuclear Energy in a Cloud Chamber
This energy activity aims for students to construct and test a cloud chamber. A water- or alcohol-supersaturated vapor is present in a cloud chamber. Particles enter the cloud chamber as the atom's nucleus releases nuclear energy upon disintegration.
Learn more: Jefferson Lab
Kinetic Energy and Motion Energy
12. Car Safety During a Crash
Students explore techniques to prevent a toy automobile from crashing while studying Newton's law of conservation of energy. In order to design and construct an effective bumper, students must consider the toy car's speed and direction of motion energy just before impact.
Learn more: STEM Inventions
13. Creating a device for dropping eggs
This motion energy activity aims to have students create a mechanism to cushion the impact of an egg being dropped from various heights. Although the egg drop experiment may teach potential & kinetic types of energy, and the law of conservation of energy, this lesson focuses on preventing the egg from shattering.
Learn more: Get Smart about STEAM
Solar Energy
14. Solar Pizza Box Oven
In this activity, kids use pizza boxes and plastic wrap to build a simple solar oven. By capturing the Sun's rays and transforming them into heat, a solar oven is able to prepare meals.
Learn more: Blendspace
15. Solar Updraft Tower
This project has students create a solar updraft tower out of paper and look into its potential for converting solar energy into motion. The top propeller will rotate when the device's air warms up.
Learn more: Walk with Easha!!
16. Do Different Colors Absorb Heat Better?
In this classic physics experiment, students investigate if the color of a substance impacts its thermal conductivity. White, yellow, red, and black paper boxes are used, and the order in which the ice cubes melt in the sun is predicted. In this way, they can determine the sequence of events that caused the ice cubes to melt.
Learn more: Teach Engineering
Heat Energy
17. Homemade Thermometer
Students create basic liquid thermometers in this classic physics experiment to examine how a thermometer is made using the thermal expansion of liquids.
Learn more: Yuri Ostr
18. Heat-curling metal
Within the context of this activity, students investigate the relationship between temperature and the expansion of various metals. Students will see that strips produced from two materials behave differently when set over a lit candle.
Learn more: Science Buddies
19. Hot air in a balloon
This experiment is the best way to show how thermal energy affects air. A tiny glass bottle, a balloon, a big plastic beaker, and access to hot water are required for this. Pulling the balloon over the bottle's rim should be your first step. After inserting the bottle into the beaker, fill it with hot water so that it surrounds the bottle. The balloon begins to expand as the water gets hotter.
Learn more: Go Science Girls
20. Heat conduction experiment
Which substances are most effective in transferring thermal energy? In this experiment, you will compare how different materials can carry heat. You'll need a cup, butter, some sequins, a metal spoon, a wooden spoon, a plastic spoon, these materials, and access to boiling water to complete this experiment.
Learn more: STEM Little Explorers
Sound Energy
21. Rubber band guitar
In this lesson, students construct a basic guitar from a recyclable box and elastic bands and investigate how vibrations produce sound energy. When a rubber band string is pulled, it vibrates, causing air molecules to move. This generates sound energy, which is heard by the ear and recognized as sound by the brain.
Learn more: Wiki How
22. Dancing Sprinkles
Students learn in this lesson that sound energy may cause vibrations. Using a plastic-covered dish and candy sprinkles, students will hum and observe what happens to the sprinkles. After conducting this investigation, they can explain why sprinkles react to sound by jumping and bouncing.
Learn more: Scientific American
23. Paper cup and string
Your kids should be accustomed to engaging in activities like this sound experiment. It's a great, entertaining, and straightforward scientific idea showing how sound waves may pass through things. You only need some twine and some paper cups.
Learn more: Global Call Forwarding
Electrical Energy
24. Coin-Powered Battery
Can a pile of coins generate electrical energy? Within the context of this activity, students make their own batteries using a few pennies, and vinegar. They get to study electrodes as well as the movement of charged particles from one metal to another through electrolytes.
Learn more: Generation Genius
25. Electric Play Dough
Students gain background knowledge on circuits in this lesson using conductive dough and insulating dough. Kids build basic "squishy" circuits using the two types of dough that light an LED so they can observe firsthand what occurs when a circuit is open or closed.
Learn more: The Dad Lab
26. Conductors and insulators
Your kids will love using this worksheet on conductors and insulators to explore how electrical energy may travel through various materials. The document includes a list of several materials, all of which you should be able to acquire quickly. Your pupils must guess whether each of these substances will be an insulator that doesn't carry an electric form of energy or a conductor of electricity.
Learn more: Science Notes
Potential and Kinetic Energy Combined
27. Paper Roller Coaster
In this lesson, students construct paper roller coasters and try out adding loops to see if they can. The marble in the roller coaster contains potential energy and kinetic energy at different locations, such as at the summit of a slope. The stone rolls down a slope with kinetic energy.
Learn more: Instructables
28. Bouncing a Basketball
Basketballs have potential energy when they are first dribbled, which is transformed into kinetic energy once the ball hits the ground. When the ball collides with anything, part of the kinetic energy is lost; as a result, when the ball bounces back up, it is unable to achieve the height it had reached before.
Learn more: Research Gate
28 Engaging Gross Activities for Middle School Students