EE's 2023
Sunday 8 May 2022
Success breeds success and I have 10 extended essays to supervise again. The school limits teacher to 5 but I have a special arrangement and can have 10. There were another 2 who wanted to do physics EE's but they weren't allowed
This weekend I have been conducting the 1st interview. Students often don't have much of an idea what they want to do at this stage so but in 30 minutes I can help them to find a suitable relationship within their chosen field.
Here I will list The student's original area of interest and the focused research question the ended up with.
Electromagnetism | The effect of Joule heating in the coils of an electrical generator. The current in the coil of a generator causes the temperature to rise, this results in an increase of resistance and a reduction in current. |
| Water jets | When water is prayed from a hose it turns into droplets. Due to air resistance, the trajectory of these droplets depends on their size, this causes the stream to spread out. What is the relationship between the width of the stream an the angle of the jet? The students, whose name is Jet, noticed this phenomenon whilst carrying out her IA. |
| Transistors | First we narrowed things down from transistors to semiconductors and the Hall effect. We then wondered if gravity would also cause the charge carriers in a semi conductor to migrate, which led to accelerating semiconductors, rotating semi conductors and finally the research question; What is the effect of rotation on a simple circuit? |
| Astrophysics | We started to look at the sources of data, our own telescope, booking time on someone else's telescope, databases and our eyes. We settled for our eyes. The actual research question isn't finalised but will be something like; Can I do better than the ancient Greeks? Without doing any preliminary research, Era will try to find out as much as possible about the stars using only her eyes. She will then compare her results with the work of the ancient Greeks. |
| Nazare | Nazare is a big wave surfing location at the Northern tip of Portugal. The waves are so big there because of a deep channel in the ocean floor that focusses the waves. So, how does the ocean floor influence the size of waves at big wave surfing locations? Pablo will use historical data of wave size and storm location combined with map data on channel depth and shape to compare the effect of different channels. He will also construct a wave machine inspired by a popular 70's desktop toy, to model the situation. |
| I am seeing the remaining 5 today |