I am genuinely hopeful that the title of my article says it all, and if not my words do the job. It has become a pain in the neck for many parents, to make their children do some productive work during the vacations, but its quite unfortunate that the children who were once overly curious about everything have somehow become so accustomed to doomscrolling that, they hardly take notice of what is going around them. Hence i am writing down some experiments, which students can do at their homes.
• Determine the centre of gravity of an irregular object:
A simple stand(preferably retort),a lamina(basically a piece of a hard paper cut in any shape), a plumb line, a thin thread and a marker will do the job. The first thing to do is make holes in the lamina with maximum distances apart, closer to the sides of the lamina. Then one is supposed to hang the lamina using the plumb line from one of the holes, and thus attach the thread onto it. The position of thread is supposed to be traced on the lamina using the marker, and the same should be repeated for all the holes. There would be a point where all the lines intersect, thus that point would be the centre of gravity. Well this seems like a lot of work, but it is not and this experiment is just timeless it can and will be used everywhere in the future.
•Verifying laws of reflection using a ray box:
Another very useful and repeated experiment. All you need is a protractor, a rectangular glass slab, a white A4 sheet, a marker and a ray box. Put the protractor on the sheet and trace its shape onto the sheet using the marker, and then simply place the slab erected on the traced shapes horizontal side. Now the whole thing is pretty simple just make the ray box project incident reflected wave on the slab, you would notice a reflected wave forming on the either side which is exactly of the same angle as the incident wave. Thus law of reflection would be proved that incident wave is equal to reflected wave. (Not to mention the two angles would form normally).
•Ripple tank experiment:
Well another what you call an OG experiment, but can prove to be helpful for a good number of students whether they be high school students or primary school students. This experiment is the main way one can visualize water waves. All one requires is a shallow glass tank, a wave generator(basically a dipper attached to a motor), a light source, a screen and an absorber in order to prevent the waves from reflecting back. Fill the tank with water, make the tank sit on overhead screen. Lower the dipper into the tank, the up and down movements will form waves. As the waves formed make ripples, because light refracts differently hence dark and bright bands will be seen. This experiment alone can be used to demonstrate wave speeds, refraction, diffraction, reflection and even interference of waves if two identical dippers are used as two identical sources.
This is pretty much it, but there are a lot more experiments that students should do, in order to get a broader understanding of physics that can be fruitful for them.
