Fishing Derby

In science, we had a fishing derby contest. There were different types of fish that were worth different points. We had two classes to make our fishing pole. The fishing pole is an electromagnet. You had to try to make the strongest electromagnet possible. The fishing pole has to have a switch that holds the magnet and lets it go. If you touch the fish, you are disqualified. We have had two designs that worked was a success but still was not very powerful. We also had one design that we are using to enter the tournament and is very powerful.


The final design worked well. The switch is a slightly complicated design. Basically, if we just have a normal electromagnet, it requires a path (wire), voltage source(batteries), resistor(nail) the electromagnet would work. However, we didn't connect the wire from the battery holder and the long wire. This is for the switch. Instead, we connected the one wire to a thumb nail and the another to a paper clip. When the paper clip touches the thumb it is a complete circuit, without them touching it's incomplete. This is
our switch, to let go of a fish we just pull the   paper clip off the thumb nail. Paige and my design picked up EXACTLY 400 points worth of fish.

It was hard at first to make this design. This was because of little problems that happened on the way. For example, we did not realize that the batteries did not have much power and we were very confused. Luckily, we tested the batteries and they were at 1.9! When we changed the batteries it helped a lot. Also, we tried to use different materials and changed the paper fastener to a thumb nail. It seemed to also help a lot. The discovery of the low battery power and bad material helped us develop our new design and that was our final product.

I thought this project was a really good idea because it helped students dicover new things on their own. This does not only help kids to be more creative but it also helped kids collabrate with others. Even though you could work by yourself it was more fun to work with a partner and discover new things.