Air Force!

Curriculum links:

• Physics – Forces, pressure and gravity
• Geography – Weather systems

Learning objectives:

1. Air pressure and force
2. How vortexes work

Materials:

• Tornado Tubes
• Airzooka
• Plastic Cups
• Bin with hole
• Fog Machine

Safety:

• Make sure the children are not too rough with the tornado tubes
• Younger children may have difficulty using the Airzooka so facilitators may need to help them hold it.

Instructions:

Theory: 5mins

Ask the children if they have any idea what mass is (and who likes going to it!). Explain that the kind of mass we’re talking about here is not the kind in a church, this mass is basically just a measure of how much stuff is in an object. It’s not the same as weight but they are linked. You’d have the same mass on earth as you would on the moon but because gravity is different you’d have a different weight.

Activity: 20mins

Bring over the Tornado Tube. Ask the children to predict what will happen if you turn the tube upside-down. The liquid stays on top! Ask them why. Air has mass and as such it takes up space and two things can’t be in the same place at the same time. There’s a hole in the plastic container in the middle but because there’s no space for the liquid and air to go they just stay where they are. What we can do though is create some space by spinning the bottle around in a circle. This pushes all the liquid out to the sides and creates a tunnel in the middle for the air to go up. Ask the children what else behaves like this. Tornados behave the same way!

• Let the children experiment with the tornado tubes.

Now that the children have been shown how air has mass lets knock things over with it! Show them the Airzooka and demonstrate how it works by blasting them with air before letting them have a competition to knock the paper cups off each other’s heads. When you pull back the string it creates a pocket of air that is pushed forward in a ring of air towards the cups.

Demonstration: 5mins

Now tell the class we are going to use and EVEN BIGGER Airzooka, joke about how expensive the homemade one was to make. Fill the bin with smoke from the fog machine and tap the bottom to send big smoke rings out of the hole.