Forces at a Distance

This 8th grade unit launches with a slow motion video of a speaker vibrating. After developing a model of sound in the previous unit, students now have the chance to explore the cause of a speaker’s vibration as opposed to the effect.

Students dissect speakers to explore what’s inside, and they build homemade cup speakers. They identify that speakers of all kinds have some of the same parts—a magnet, a coil of wire, and a membrane. Students investigate each of these parts to figure out how they work together in the speaker system. Along the way, students manipulate the parts to see how this technology could be modified to apply to systems in very different contexts, like MagLev trains, junkyard magnets, and electric motors.

Forces at a Distance is aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards and is freely available for download. This unit is part of the OpenSciEd middle school science program. BSCS Science Learning lead a consortium of organizations and science education experts in the development of this three-year program for grades 6-8.