Home School Jules

Friction is a force that acts against a moving object or prevents a stationary object to move if a force is applied to it.  It is described as an OPPOSING FORCE. To relate this to skateboarding we have decided to illustrate some of the statements in my GCSE book using skateboarding.   1)If an objective has no force propelling it along it will always slow down and stop because of friction.   Example: If you stop scooting your foot on the floor, you will eventually come to a stop. 2)Friction always acts in the opposite direction to movement. Example: Your board slows down because of friction force pushing against the direction you are going. 3)To travel at a steady speed the driving force needs to balance the frictional forces. Example: The reason why you have to keep scooting on a flat surface. 4)You get friction between two surfaces in contact or when an object passes through a fluid (drag).  A fluid can be either a liquid or a gas.   Example: Whe...

 Last night I changed the bearings on my skateboard, which lead us to ask some questions about friction and forces. With dad's help, I unscrewed the wheels of the board, popped out the old bearings and replaced them with Reds Precision Skate Bearings. With the new bearings in place, we wanted to see the difference between the two. So we screwed on my brothers old bearings on one wheel to see the difference. The video below shows how much longer the reds bearing last, this is because the reds have less friction and are more spherical in shape.  You can see that the new bearings allow the wheels to continue spinning for longer than the old ones. The wheels all weigh much the same and the axels are all made of much the same materials so this difference in how long they spin for must be mostly down to the differences between the bearings.  Bones Redz bearings are produced to a very high standard of precision in their "sphericity" and are made of a high grade steel that is ver...

With the new restrictions due to the national lockdown for Covid19 we needed to find an alternative PE activity. Tom has been enjoying his skateboard adventure so far so Jules decided to try this out too. We ordered a board and safety pack online and these arrived earlier this week. Here's some footage of Julia's first trip to the local park: