That was a question posed by some of the children in my class. So we decided to find out why!
First, we discussed why we thought they floated. Quite quickly we realised it was down to a number of factors. Elliot thought it was because the weight of the boat was spread out across the water, Aaron said he thought it had something to do with the tension of the water and Robbie said that there was pressure from the water pushing up on the boat. Lenix said that because the boat was hollow it meant that the boat had air in it which helped it float. Frankly, I was pretty impressed with their ideas. All of these factors mean that boats made of metal can float.
After this we made our own boats out of tin foil and had a competition to see who could design the boat that could hold the most weight. Jack won this competition with an incredible 300g in his tin foil boat before it sank!
Mr Tilmouth
