Teaching Sequence: Basic Electric Units

Learning Unit: What is Electricity

The Composition of Matter (Atomic Model by N. Bohr)

The atom is composed of the core and the atomic shell.

The atomic core itself consists of two different elementary particles:

protons and neutrons. These are called nucleons.

Protons are positively charged elementary particles.

Neutrons are non-charged elementary particles, they are electrically neutral.

In the atomic shell the so called electrons move around the core.

Electrons are negatively charged elementary particles.

The numbers of the charges of proton and electron are exactly the same, but with a different polarity. Therefore they neutralize each other.

The entire atom is electrically neutral to the outside.

To give you an example of the size correlations: if the atomic core were as big as a can of beans the shell would be as large as a football stadium.