Electrostatics lesson for Bartley Green year 10s and their ‘non-specialist’ teacher

Enthusiastic Year 10 students from the local Bartley Green School visited the Physics Factory for a session on Electrostatics, which is part of their Physics GCSE P2 specification. They each had a go at charging balloons and ‘sticking’ them to uncharged surfaces, moving a stream of water using invisible electric fields, discovering how like and unlike charged objects repel and attract each other respectively and causing paper ‘dancers’ to jump up and down. The session ended with some Van Der Graaff demonstrations as fun for the pupils and CDP for their teacher (who, like many biology-specialists, was previously apprehensive about teaching the topic and using this high voltage equipment).