Electromagnet Fishing Pole

In Science, as a part of our electricity unit, we have been making electromagnets. Our mission is to make an electromagnet fishing pole (paperclips and brass fasteners being the fish). The fishing pole also had to have a switch, that turned off the electromagnetism. Here are all the plans I've had, leading up to final design.

We were given a 50cm wooden pole, two AA batteries, and there were other miscellaneous items available to us

First Design:

For this design, things were quite simple. We simply had the battery pack on the wooden pole, and the battery's wires were connected to a steel nail, which had a wire coil coiled around it. We already knew that coiling wire around the nail was required to have an electromagnet. There were two problems with this design: 1. The electromagnetic force wasn't powerful enough. 2. It didn't have a switch. Although these were the obvious issues with this design, we did run into other issues.

Second Design:

We had the same set up as the previous design, but a problem we didn't think we would encounter is having the battery pack mess us up. We tested our fishing rod with and without the battery pack, and the strength of the electromagnet was much higher without the battery pack. The video below explains this. The picture to the left shows two nails together. The thing is, we didn't have enough strength to pick up a large paperclip, so we tried having two nails to get more strength. That didn't make a difference, but the type of nail did. In the previous design, we used a steel nail. Here, we used an iron nail because we learned that iron conducts electricity better than steel. So our second design had two iron nails, no battery pack, and still no switch.



Third (Final) Design:

Our third and final design was our best design. We decided to include the battery pack, because it helps keep the batteries together. What we decided to do was make sure we have a battery pack that doesn't mess things up, by testing multiple battery packs. Since two nails didn't make a difference, we just used one iron nail. For our switch, we used a brass fastener. We had one battery pack wire connected to one side of the wire coil- this was a permanent connection. For the other, we put the battery wire under the brass fastener (that was taped to the wooden pole) and put the wire coil wire under the other flap of the brass fastener. We thought of using a thumb tack or paper clip for this same switch idea, but brass fasteners seemed to conduct electricity the best. So technically, the electromagnetism was going through the brad. That was our final design!

Here is a video of us explaining how our last and final design worked (taken right before the derby):