A Magnetic Personality
Students examine how magnets workCopyright Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Students learn about magnets and how they are formed. They investigate the properties of magnets and how engineers use magnets in technology. Specifically, students learn about magnetic memory storage, which is the reading and writing of data information using magnets, such as in computer hard drives, zip disks and flash drives.
Development of the many technologies used in magnetic memory storage is the job of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, computer scientists, materials engineers and physicists. These engineers use their understanding of magnets to devise techniques that make it possible to store more information using less material, and ways to increase the speed with which computers can access memory. Zip disks and MP3 players are just two examples of magnetic memory technologies developed by engineers.
After this lesson, students should be able to:
- List some characteristics of magnets (north and south poles, spinning electrons, etc.).
- Explain that engineers use magnets to store information.
- Give an example of magnetic memory storage (computers, flash drives, zip disks).