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One of the experiences that children seem to find most exciting in the school science laboratory is the hair raising one of being charged up using a van de Graaf generator and receiving small electric shocks. Children are quite rightly concerned about when electricity might hurt them and what its effects are. They are motivated by science directly concerned with the human body, with obvious impact on their lives. This is particularly important for girls, who often seem to find other aspects of electricity amongst the least interesting topics in science. Here is an opportunity for the teacher to build on immediate and genuine curiosity. Pupils are already well aware that mains electricity at 240 V can be lethal, yet the teacher seems strangely happy to expose them here to what he claims is tens of thousands of volts! They ask questions such as 'Is it amps of volts that kill you?' with a genuine desire to try and resolve the paradox. When young pupils see an oscilloscope for the first time, they often immediately associate it with the heart monitor seen on a TV hospital drama. ('He's dead sir!' they say, as you show them the timebase operating in the absence of an input signal). They use a microphone to try and detect an ECG signal without success. The real heart monitor works in a totally different way, and that it is in fact quite closely related to the action of electric shocks. The article is a summary of the reading the author undertook to try and cure his ignorance of the interaction between electricity and the human body, so that he could make something of this spontaneous interest on the part of the pupils. It also provides background material for A-level potential medical students, who often study physics without seeing its direct relevance to medicine. |
