magnetic car

laurab · Post by **laurab** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 12:17 pm

Hello all,

My 9 year old is trying to build a magnetic car for a school project, and is having trouble. The car can be made out of anything, but needs to be no more than 7" long, must have 4 wheels, and cannot be pulling anything. The car needs to propel itself 10-15 ft using magnets. Any type and number of magnets can be used, but the student can't touch the magnets on the car. He's not having much luck in his designs so far, and I'm not much help. Anybody got any ideas for designs and magnet placements? For the record, he's tried building a few cars out of toilet paper rolls and Legos. Thanks for any help!

deleted-71588 · Post by **deleted-71588** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 9:46 am

Try http://www.primaryscience.ie/dps2005/me ... ic_car.pdf

laurab · Post by **laurab** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:24 am

Thanks so much!

deleted-71591 · Post by **deleted-71591** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 3:12 pm

Hello Laurab!

I saw that you were given help on the design of the car, but did not know if you were making any headway with the actual propulsion (since the student cannot touch the car or the magnet, this proves to be the difficult part). Have you given any thought to how you are going to do this? I have done something similar to this in a magnet train I made in college, but it involved electromagets, which are definately too complex for a 9-year-old.

magnetic car

magnetic car

Propulsion