11.06.09

Radiometers

This week the seventh and eighth grades measured light! They used radiometers and clamp lamps to compute the strength of light. They left the lamps on for a certain amount of time and a certain distance away from the radiometer and then recorded how long the radiometers kept spinning after they turned the lights off. The Radiometer is four small pieces of black and white paper that is inside a glass orb. When put in the light, the pieces of paper spin.

“I thought that it was really cool we got to pick our times, we pretty much got to choose our own experiment!” said an eighth grader. After they finished with the initial experiment, they recorded the data and averaged the three trials. Then they used their graphing skills and recorded everything in bar graphs. “It was interesting how the distance affected the radiometers speed,” said another student. Overall, “when we move the radiometer farther back, the speed decreases,” concluded one of the seventh graders.

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