Yesterday I decided to do another design experiment with my second year class. This is hopefully the last. I don't say hopefully because I don't like doing them but because I think its time to start concentrating on the exam. Anyway the theme was NiChrome wire. I bought 20m of 5 different diameter wire from Ebay last year and have been saving it for a special occasion. The idea was that the students would devise a research question related to the wire. There  were quite a few interesting ones but I'm not going to write about them here because some of my students haven't exactly finished (started) yet. I think it was a successful theme but there was one thing that I had not foreseen. The wire was delivered in a loose coil not a spool, as soon as the coil was released it went haywire (so that's what haywire means) as you can see in the photo. Next time I will wind the wire onto spools before the lesson.