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From compass to hard drive—integrated activities for studying magnets

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 Papers
iopscience.org/ped

From compass to hard drive—

integrated activities for studying
magnets
J Dean and D A Allwood
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield, Portobello Street,
Sheffield S1 3JD, UK

E-mail: j.dean@sheffield.ac.uk and d.allwood@sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract
We describe a range of practical activities that allows students to investigate
the properties and applications of magnets. The activities can be used in
isolation or used together to build a rounded understanding of the subject area.
The activities include simple demonstrations using common or inexpensive
equipment, hands-on experiments for small groups, and interactive problem
solving suitable for whole classes. These can be tailored for students in either
primary or secondary education.

1. Introduction age-appropriate understanding of magnets and

Magnets and their effects are often a source of
fascination for school students. Part of the appeal
seems to lie in the invisible nature of magnetic
fields. Featonby has published some excellent
examples of activities with magnets suitable for
schools [1–4]. However, practical demonstrations
and experiments involving magnets that build
understanding are not abundant and students are
often unaware of the many applications of mag-
netic materials.
This article describes the activities we have
used in schools when delivering one-hour ses-
sions on magnets to UK Year 3–6 pupils (aged
7–11). However, everything here is appropriate
for students in secondary education and can be
adapted for many age groups. Indeed, we find uni-
versity students still find the activities absorbing.
The session starts with ideas that will be
familiar to students, but each activity allows them
to discover a key point about magnets. The activi-
ties are designed to build on each other to allow
students to develop a reasonably sophisticated
how we use them.
In describing our approach, we hope that
others will be able to use the individual activities
in isolation or combination, or even deliver the
whole session.
2.  Magnetic fields
2.1.  Confusing a compass
Requirements: a compass in a transparent case
(a map-reading compass is ideal), an over-
head projector (OHP) and a reasonably strong
magnet.
It is a truism that audiences like nothing
more than being told what they already know.
Starting with a compass is very unintimidating
for most students and they are happy to share that
it ‘always’ points north and, sometimes, that it is
a magnet. This can be demonstrated by using the
OHP to image the silhouette of the compass nee-
dle onto a screen and confirm that the compass is
indeed pointing north.

0031-9120/14/060663+8$33.00  © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd Physics Education  49 (6)  663

J Dean and D A Allwood
For the ‘strong’ magnet, we tend to use a
‘wand’ made up of small, cylindrical (1.5 cm
long, 3 mm diameter) Nd–Fe–B magnets. Sets of
these are available at a small cost from a variety
of online educational science suppliers. The cyl-
inders can be made into a wand very easily by
placing them north-to-south. A wand of a few
magnetic cylinders is convenient to use with the
OHP as it doesn’t obscure much of the projected
image.
A class that is shown the wand magnet and
asked what they might know about it will be keen
to share that magnets have a north pole and a
south pole. A younger class will enjoy a volunteer
trying to pronounce ‘neodymium iron boron’ and
also to find out that this is the world’s strongest
type of magnet.
Bringing one end of the magnet (ideally hav-
ing a volunteer doing this) will of course cause
the compass to change its orientation and point Figure 1.  A simple motor design.
in any direction. This leads naturally to the ques-
tion of ‘why?’ and the answer that the Earth con- One of the most common applications of
tains a magnetic moment—or, more often, that magnets is in electrical motors. There are several
the Earth is a magnet and itself has a north and a designs of motors suitable for school students to
south pole. create, e.g. [2]. Figure  1 shows a simple motor
The compass activity allows the concept of that can be constructed by students in a few sec-
magnetic fields to be introduced. It is also clear onds. Attach the head of the nail to the magnet.
that magnets are a source of magnetic fields and The nail is now magnetized and can be suspended
affected by them. from the negative terminal (flat end) of the battery,
when this is held vertically. One end of the copper
ider discussion. Older classes may enjoy
W
wire can be held with a forefinger on the positive
a philosophical discussion about what a
battery terminal and the other end brushed very
‘north’ and ‘south’ pole is: if given two mag-
gently onto the side of the magnet. The magnet
nets, we assert that north and south poles
and nail should now start to rotate. Relatively
attract; if one of those magnets becomes
high rotational velocities are possible with this.
the Earth, we assert that the north pole of a
The visual element of this can be improved by
compass is attracted to the magnetic north
using permanent markers to draw a few lines of
pole of the Earth. Clearly something is
different colours along the length of the magnets.
amiss—either we are naming the north and
This simple motor arrangement is well known
south poles of hand-held magnets incorrectly
among science educators, but this is a very effec-
or the Earth’s north pole is, in fact, a south
tive demonstration of how magnets and electricity
pole. We recommend not discussing this with
can produce motion. A common reason for failure
younger students for fear of confusion!
is if the point of the nail wanders onto the recess
between the negative terminal and battery casing,
2.2.  Simple motors and generators
which causes the nail to become stuck and stops
Requirements: cylindrical Nd–Fe–B magnets (as rotating. More concerning for students is that
above), AA or AAA batteries, a bag of nails (gal- there is an increase in electric current drawn and
vanized wire nails, ~20 mm long are ideal), some the wire becomes quite hot. Level 2 (7–11 years)
short sections of single-stranded electrical (copper) students invariably assume they have been elec-
wire and a hand-held generator with light (available trocuted but, curiously, are reassured when told
commercially, e.g. Science Museum products). not to worry as they’ve just been burned instead

664 P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n November 2014

 From compass to hard drive
(please note—no student has ever suffered burns!
Just mild heating). The relevance of motors can
then be reinforced with a short discussion about
where they are used. The essential feature that
is useful to bring out here is that magnets used
in motors allow electricity to be converted into
motion.
The hand-held generator (dynamo) can then
be given to a volunteer. A typical system will have
a crank handle that, when turned, causes a light to
shine. A simple discussion about what is happen-
ing here established that a coil of electrical wire
is being moved between the poles of magnets to
make the light shine, i.e. motion is being con-
verted into electricity.
Wider discussion. Examples of uses of
motors include power tools, hybrid/electric
vehicles, washing machines/tumble dryers,
vacuum cleaners and electric toothbrushes.
Images of these are readily available online
and make good discussion slides. For gen- Figure 2. (a) Magnetic configuration of fridge magnets.
(b) Directions for moving fridge magnets relative to
erators, examples include steam turbines, each other. (c) Magnetic field viewing strip on a fridge
wind turbines, wind-up electrical goods magnet revealing stripe domains.
(radios, torches) and dynamos on bicycles.
efficient as it increases the magnetic field that is
available on one side of the magnet while creating
3.  Magnetic domains no magnetic field on the other side.
3.1.  Fridge magnets Students can begin to explore the Halbach
array configuration by placing the fridge magnet
Requirements: pairs of fridge magnets (ideally pair picture side together to find that there is no
each pair from the same source) and magnetic field magnetic attraction. The fridge magnets should
viewer film (available from educational suppliers). then be arranged with the magnetic sides in con-
Students are usually taught that magnets have tact and with the same length sides adjacent to
a single north pole and a single south pole as a tenet each other. The two magnets should then be dis-
of science. The simple activity with fridge mag- placed very slightly laterally in one direction and
nets presented here allows them to discover that held gently by the revealed edges so that they can
the truth is far richer. The magnetic arrangement be slid across each other lightly. Once this is done,
of any magnetic material (or rather, any ferromag- repeat this in the orthogonal direction by gripping
netic or ferrimagnetic material) is composed of a the magnet edges in the perpendicular direction to
myriad array of regions, each possessing its own the original ones (figure 2(b)). The motion in one
‘north’ and ‘south’ pole. It is the average effect of direction will be smooth while in the other direc-
these regions that creates the overall ‘north’ and tion the magnets will jump apart periodically. This
‘south’ poles that are commonly recognized. has the feel of the fridge magnets being corrugated
Fridge magnets are usually made from fer- in structure, although the students can confirm
rimagnetic ceramic materials held in a plastic that the surfaces are in fact smooth to the touch.
binder. They are magnetized during their manu- Students can be challenged to interpret the results
facture to have a ‘Halbach array’ configuration. of the sliding test and try to predict something of
This is shown in figure 2(a) (for clarity, the head the magnetic structure of the fridge magnet.
of each arrow represents a ‘north’ pole and each The magnetic field viewing film may then
tail a ‘south’ pole). This arrangement is highly be given to students and placed over a magnetic

November 2014 P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n 665

J Dean and D A Allwood
surface of a fridge magnet. This will reveal a series
of dark and light stripes (figure 2(c)) that are read-
ily visible. The reason for the sliding effect lies
in the Halbach array configuration resulting in an
alternating series of apparent ‘north’ and ‘south’
pole stripes along the magnetic surface of each
fridge magnet. The magnetic field viewing film
doesn’t differentiate between the poles but never-
theless gives a clear indication of their presence.
These regions of continuous magnetization (a
‘north’ or ‘south’ pole stripe) are known as ‘mag-
netic domains’.
This is an important conceptual step for stu-
dents—that magnetic configurations in materials
can be, and usually are, much more complex than
simply being a single ‘north’ and ‘south’ pole.

3.2.  Mobile magnetic domains

Requirements: optical microscope (ideally trans-
mission light microscope—light source and
objective lens on either side of sample—and
USB-linked to enable the whole class to observe
images. A reflection microscope can also work if
a mirror is placed behind the sample—although
the lower polarizer may have to be removed in
this case), a magnetic domain viewer (e.g. avail-
able from TEL-Atomic) and a magnetic ‘wand’
as in activity 1.
The previous activity is very useful in estab-
lishing the existence of magnetic domains. This
activity builds on that to show their dynamic
nature. The requirements here are more expen-
sive but the demonstration is very impressive and
memorable. Figure 3.  Polarized light images of magnetic domains
in ferrite films under (a) zero, (b) positive and (c)
negative magnetic fields.
Wider discussion. The commercial domain
viewer has an integrated solenoid to allow
magnetic fields to be applied to the sample The domain viewer contains a thin piece of
using a simple dc power supply. This gives magnetic garnet material (most likely an iron sili-
a more controlled approach to applying cate) held between two optical polarizers, which
magnetic field than using the wand. It also have transmission axes at 90° to each other. The
allows a wider range of advanced magnetic garnet has magnetization oriented out of the sam-
properties to be explored, such as: elastic ple plane, which means that ‘north’ and ‘south’
(repeatable) movement of magnetic domain poles are on the large surfaces. The optical polar-
walls (boundaries between domains) under izers in the domain viewer cause the Faraday
low applied magnetic fields; domain wall effect (of rotation of optical polarization through
pinning and inelastic (non-repeatable) the magnetic material) to render oppositely ori-
domain wall motion at high fields; mag- ented magnetic domains to appear as either
netic hysteresis; and plotting a magnetic dark or light regions. Observation of this under
hysteresis curve. the microscope shows that a maze-like array of

666 P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n November 2014


magnetic domains is visible (figure 3(a)). At this
point, the proportion of dark and light regions is
approximately equal, so the average magnetiza-
tion of the material is zero. This is an excellent
demonstration of the difference between local and
total magnetization.
If the magnetic wand is now brought very
close to the magnetic material, the domain pat-
tern will change to become either darker or
lighter (figure 3(b)). For best effect, the wand
should be held as vertically as possible and not
obscure the microscope objective lens. Viewed
carefully,  the  preferred domains first widen
slightly before the boundaries between domains
(domain walls) start sudden movements. Avoid
saturating the magnetic material to being com-
pletely dark or light if possible. Instead, when
the magnetic wand is removed, the return to zero
magnetic field conditions causes the dark and
light patterns to return to a balanced configura-
tion, although almost certainly not the one that
was seen originally. If the magnetic wand is now
turned around to reverse the applied field direc-
tion (i.e. using a ‘south’ pole now instead of a
‘north’ pole previously) and brought close to the
sample, it has the opposite effect to before—if
dark regions were preferred before, now light
regions are (figure 3(c)).
We are seeing here the same type of pro-
cess as we observed with the compass in activity
1; the magnetization is aligning to the applied
magnetic field. We see this with the magnetic
domain viewer as an increase in the dark or light
regions (representing ‘north’ or ‘south’ poles on
the surface). We have found with students from
Years 3–13 (ages 7–18), the exploration works
best if the various demonstrations are performed
(with volunteers of course) without offering a
scientific explanation. Instead, groups that are
challenged to think through what might be hap-
pening (‘What are the dark and light regions?’,
‘Why do these regions grow and shrink?’) invar-
iably arrive at the right understanding, given a
little guidance.
This activity demonstrates that not only do
magnetic materials have multiple regions of ‘north’
and ‘south’ poles, but that these regions are not nec-
essarily stationary and are often highly dynamic.
Wider discussion. The learning point
from this activity can be applied to the
November 2014
From compass to hard drive
‘rod and ball’ magnetic sculpting toys (e.g.
Magnetix). The rods are permanent mag-
nets with fixed magnetic domains. The balls
are ‘soft’ magnetic materials. In isolation
these have no overall magnetization but
become magnetized in proximity with one
of the rods. The magnetic field from the rod
magnets aligns the pre-existing magnetic
domains in the balls to create overall mag-
netization in the balls. This is also why the
nail becomes magnetized when in contact
with the magnet in the motor activity above
(activity 2).
4.  Magnetic hard-drive memory
4.1.  Seeing into the mind of a computer
Requirements: an old magnetic hard disk drive
from a computer and a screwdriver—note that all
data will be lost and unrecoverable! Cardboard
1-byte demonstrator (see below). ASCII-to-
binary translation sheets (see www.flashyscience.
com/resources/…). Pre-prepared set of sheets
containing a magnetically coded message (see
www.flashyscience.com/resources/...).
Wider discussion. A comparison to help stu-
dents understand the nanoscale is that if the
difference in scale between a nanometre and
a metre is similar to the difference in width
between a marble and the Earth.
Most of us store data from computer
games, documents, videos and music on the
magnetic hard disk drives found in computers.
Many are unaware of the complex engineer-
ing challenges that have been met in ensuring
magnetic hard drives are a cheap, fast and reli-
able method for day-to-day use. This activity
explains how we can take data, such as text
in a document, and store this as a ‘code’ on a
magnetic hard drive to be read back at a later
time. In other words, this allows students to
‘see into the mind of a computer’. There are
many different aspects that can be discussed
and explained, ranging from the basic concepts
at junior level to tackling the latest engineer-
ing challenges at higher levels [5, 6]. This is
a whole-class class activity in which they are
split into small groups to decipher part of the
P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n 667
J Dean and D A Allwood
Figure 4. The parts of a hard disk drive and how it
stores data. (a) The main parts are (i) disk, (ii) motor
(iii) slider arm and (iv) electronic circuit controls. (b)
A schematic of the granular structure on the surface
of the disk. (c) A simplified portrayal of data storage
highlighting how magnetic orientation (red and blue)
can represent binary code.
text and work together as a class to interpret
the whole message.
Taking apart an old hard disk drive is one of
the best ways of helping students to understand
its operation (figure 4(a)). The main components
of a hard drive are: (i) one or more magnetically-
coated disks that store data on its surface as a
concentric spiral; (ii) a motor to rotate the disks;
(iii) a slider arm that moves across the disk and
contains devices for writing and reading magnetic
data; and (iv) the integrated electronic circuit
boards to control all parts quickly and accurately.
Although it often isn’t appropriate to describe
in detail how a hard drive works, a brief descrip-
tion is given here for information. The disk (or
‘platter’) is a glass or ceramic plate coated with
a few nanometres of magnetic material such as
CoPt (cobalt platinum). This has been grown to
form individual magnetic ‘grains’ on the surface,
as shown in figure  4(b). This means that effec-
tively the disk is coated with tiny rod-shaped mag-
nets, each only a few nanometres in diameter and
with a north or south pole pointing out of the sur-
face. Writing is performed using an electromag-
net in the slider arm to change the magnetization
668 P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n
of a small region of grains to either north or south
pole upwards, shown as red or blue respectively
in figure 4. Reading back the magnetization uses
a nano-scale sensor on the slider arm that follows
the concentric data tracks, much like a needle in a
record player or laser in a CD reader.
The disk is driven at up to 17 000 rpm and
the read–write head is engineered to float on a
cushion of air just a few nanometres above the
surface, writing and reading the north and south
poles of the little magnetic regions as it passes.
To appreciate the engineering challenges on this
device we use, if the read head was scaled up to
the size of a jet plane, it would be flying at 800
times the speed of sound, only 1 cm above the
ground, counting and interpreting every blade of
grass it passed over.
A simpler route to explaining hard drive
operation is to use a demonstrator made with
painted cardboard sections  that can rotate about
a split pin (figure 4(c)). This can be used to illus-
trate how the magnetization of regions of the disk
can be reversed and how to store the data upon
its surface.
Wider discussion. Although the magnetic
CoPt grain is magnetically hard (requires
a large field to magnetize), thermal effects
even at room temperature can affect the bits’
stability over time. In fact there is a high
probability that in five years the thermal
energy will rotate the grains’ magnetization
causing data errors.
It is now important to explain the code that
computers use to store data. Our alphabet is made
up of 26 letters, which can be put together in any
number of ways to form words and sentences.
We have upper- and lower-case letters, plus other
characters such as the numbers 0–9, spaces, com-
mas and full stops. A computer is far less sophis-
ticated and only uses two ‘letters’ or characters:
a ‘1’ and a ‘0’ (we call these ‘bits’). Computers
can represent our letters and other characters by
using different sequences of ‘1’ and ‘0’ charac-
ters. These look very strange to us but are the
‘words’ that a computer recognizes. A string of
eight ‘1’s and ‘0’s (known as a ‘byte’) can be used
to represent any of the possible symbols, letters
or characters found on a keyboard. This is usu-
ally best described as a ‘code’ that computers use
(officially, this is ASCII code, meaning ‘American
November 2014

Figure 5.  The individually completed code sheets representing each bit of data as a magnetic state. Each set is
8 bytes for 1 byte and is converted by the students into the respective character using a code sheet. When placed
together they form the full sentence.
Standard Codes for Information Exchange’).
A code sheet of common characters is avail-
able from http://flashyscience.com/hard_drive_
decoder.php.
The ‘1’s and ‘0’s are each represented in a
magnetic hard drive either by a north or south
pole oriented out of the magnetic film surface.
The cardboard demonstrator can again be used
to illustrate this using the rotating sections. If it
is constructed with eight rotating sections  (each
representing a single ‘bit’) then actual character
code can also be demonstrated very easily.
Wider discussion. This discussion does not
have to be limited to magnetic systems. It
is interesting to ask students to think of any
storage media and how it stores the data.
Generally you will typically find a binary
storage mechanism. For instance, a tran-
sistor stores information as either current
flow through it or not such as those used in
flash and solid state drives. CDs can store
digital music as the bumps on the surface
of the disk to control whether or not light is
reflected to a sensor.
To help students understand this process and
how many bytes are needed to store a sentence
of unformatted text on a hard drive, we get them
to decode a ‘magnetic’ message themselves.
This is a great 20 min activity involving every-
one in the class doing their bit (pun intended).
This works best with a class divided into groups
of two to three, each with an ASCII decoding
November 2014
From compass to hard drive
sheet. Before the lesson, we take a sentence such
as ‘Congratulations! You can see into the mind
of a computer!’. This contains 56 characters,
including 44 letters, two capital letters, nine
spaces and two exclamation marks. This can
then be converted into a binary code of 56 ASCII
bytes. There are free conversion tools available
online for this, e.g. www.asciimadness.bler.bler.
For our sentence, this conversion gives the fol-
lowing sequence:
01000011011011110110111001100111011
100100110000101110100011101010110110001
100001011101000110100101101111011011100
111001100100001001000000101100101101111
011101010010000001100011011000010110111
000100000011100110110010101100101001000
000110100101101110011101000110111100100
000011101000110100001100101001000000110
110101101001011011100110010000100000011
011110110011000100000011000010010000001
100011011011110110110101110000011101010
1110100011001010111001000100001.
We then convert these into groups of eight
‘bits’ for each byte. On prepared sheets, we show
each byte represented as a sequence of coloured
bar magnets, one for each bit (‘1’ or ‘0’) and with
either the north (red) or south pole (blue) shown
at the top (e.g. figure  5). We typically prepare
three or four bytes (each of eight magnets) on a
single sheet and number the sheets in the correct
order. If you would like to create your own sheets
we have created an html5 application that can
generate such sheets as shown in figure 5, this is
P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n 669
J Dean and D A Allwood
freely available at http://flashyscience.com/hard_
drive_decoder.php.
Each group of two or three students is then
given a sheet of unique magnetic code that needs
deciphering. They can write under each magnet
picture whether it is storing a ‘1’ or ‘0’ and then,
using their ASCII code sheet, which character
each set of eight ‘1’s and ‘0’s represents. There
are usually more sheets than there are groups,
which is helpful in keeping faster-working groups
occupied for longer.
Typically groups end up with a small part
of a word that will make no sense on its own.
However, the class is asked to piece together the
decoded sheets in order on the classroom floor to
see the original sentence emerge. The occasional
error adds to the entertainment as the whole class
reads out the message together.
A few comparisons between the class and a
hard disk drive can be made. While on average,
a class of 30 seven-year-old students take about
20 min to convert the binary code into readable
English, maybe with one or two errors, the modern
hard disk drive can do this in just over half a micro-
second without any errors. Each piece of paper in
this example contains only three or four bytes of
information, whereas a modern day hard drive can
store over 1 TB (terabyte, 1 000 000 000 bytes) on a
3.5ʺ disk. This is equivalent to more than 150 bil-
lion bits of paper that would, if laid side-by-side,
go around the world more than 1000 times.
This activity demonstrates not only how data
can be broken down into a binary code, but the
speed and scale it is done on in front of our very
eyes. Students doing this will get a sense of the
engineering and physical challenges that have
been overcome so they can be sure that when they
save their homework, it is very likely that it will
still be there the next day!
Wider discussion. An interesting project
for older school students would be to
create a track of real magnets that can be
arranged to represent data and a magnetic
sensor (Hall sensor or a magnetoresistive
element) that can be passed above them,
670 P h y s i c s E d u c at i o n
revealing their orientation with its output
voltage polarity.
5. Conclusion
We hope this variety of activities will inspire
school teachers to explore magnets in new ways
with their students. Although we deliver these
activities in a fast-paced one-hour session, each
one is easily adapted to individually longer but
separate investigations. Our experience is that
even younger students are able to grasp all of the
principles we have described. The educational
results of the activities can be very surprising,
particularly the hard drive decoding. We have
found teachers surprised to see normally disrup-
tive students become class leaders and the quick-
est at producing decoded data. We only wish that
we could claim this was by our design, but it
seems to work well in any case!
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge Professor Dan
Dahlberg for showing the wonders of fridge mag-
nets as part of his (more technical) IEEE Distin-
guished Lecture in 2010.
Received 4 June 2014, in final form 26 June 2014,
accepted for publication 23 July 2014
doi:10.1088/0031-9120/49/6/663
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