Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Help!! )

My son a 3rd grader wants to make a science project using a solar panel. My husband bought it and little motor. His hypothesis is: I think the world will be a better place if we do natural resources. Problem statement: What will happen if we didn't have to use gas or oil? I guess these are ot suitable. At tis point I am clueless. I don't know where to go what to create and aevdything my husband bought was about $50.00. I know my son wants to prove that the earth would be a better place if we wre to use solare energy rather thasn gas/oil. but how can he prove this?
Than you,
Pilar

Hi Pilyb28,

I'm going to move your topic to the physics forum so that our Experts can help you there.

I think the first step to making the world better by using natural resources is to make sure that solar energy is useful to us. We have a simpler experiment on this website that involves constructing a simple circuit and measuring how much electricity the solar panel creates in different lighting conditions. It's still a bit advanced for a student in K-5, but it looks like it can be simplified so that he doesn't have to know the equations, just qualitatively what they mean.

Here's the project: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p014.shtml

With that project, his question could be narrowed down to how much electricity is created depending on the intensity of the light. So really, he'd be figuring out how the sun's energy can be transformed into electricity.

You could even look at how much electricity household items use, and compare that with the output of the solar cell.

Good luck and let us know if you have more questions!

Thank you Amber.

I saw the project and it does seem a little advanced for third grader. How`is it that I may simplify it?

Thank you,
pily

To simplify this project, I'd build the circuit but wouldn't get too bogged down in the technical details. From the experiment he would just need to explain that the more powerful the light, the more electricity the solar cell makes. There are a lot of other terms in the project, like "semiconductor" and "Ohm's Law" where he could either ignore these details for now or you could find a science website that explains this in kid terms. For example, for "semiconductor" he could just know that the solar cell is made out of a material called a "semiconductor" and this material is also in our computers.

I was able to find a more basic project that has to do with solar cells. Check this out and see if it would be better: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p061.shtml