Sometimes studies in the Elms end with a large culminating event. Sometimes we celebrate among ourselves. Such was the case with electricity. This week we made a party line with ten and a half old fashioned land line phones (G.L. only wanted the talking half, not the listening half).
Students had to apply what they knew about series circuits and polarity, conductivity and short circuits in order to get the system going. Even then, we had to do a lot of trouble shooting. Each pair of Elms got their own phone working and then added it into a larger circuit. Larger circuits then joined together.
Never satisfied, the Elms wanted to make sure we had made our party line as big as possible and I worked furiously with a few students to create some "new" phones from the bits and pieces that we had. It's so rare that we can take something electronic apart nowadays and see how it works and how to fix it. When we opened up the phones, we saw our two connections very clearly and students could really see how the speaker and receiver worked.
We hope to have a chance to chat with the Tamaracks on our phone soon. (Yet another good way to solidify our learning -- teaching others).
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