Today we continued with our work on forces. This time exploring the effects of upthrust and buoyancy. The pupils looked at a range of boat designs and discussed the shape and size of these. The pupils were first tasked with creating a boat from play doh that was able to float without letting the water inside. We found that those with a large surface area on the base floated the best. The pupils were then tasked with adding marbles to their boats to see how many ‘passengers’ it could hold before sinking, and discovered those that could spread out the weight evenly floated better. Easten managed to add 7 passengers to his boat before it eventually sank. We will continue to explore this topic further using a range of materials next lesson.