Hands on Hydraulics and Pneumatics for Kids

My kids assembled various hydraulic and pneumatic powered vehicles and ran tests to determine how they performed.

Thames & Kosmos are producers of hands-on science kits for kids. My son really enjoyed the build your own remote control vehicle kit so we decided to purchase the Thames & Kosmos Air + Water Power.

The blue box in the photo above is a motor which can be used with either air or water. A black wheel was attached to the motor, it was filled with air and the hedgehog received a wild ride. Later the motor was tested with water in the sink.

Next, two identical vehicles were built and raced across the driveway. The water squirting out the back powering the cars forward is visible in the above photo. They were also filled with air, but the kids determined water worked much better for this experiment.

The vehicles were tested on slopes to see how they could overcome gravity.

They were also tested on different surfaces to see how they could overcome friction.

The kit comes with about six different project ideas as well as detailed scientific explanations for how hydraulics and pneumatics work. In the future, I will be encouraging the kids to keep a notebook, use a stop watch, and measure distance traveled of their various configurations and experiments. They really enjoyed and learned a lot already.

Check out these great blogs full of educational activity ideas.