Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

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!

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

Thanks so much!

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.