Problems with friction!

Year Five were faced with a problem...

Captain Smith of the Titanic had several lifeboats which needed to be dragged across the deck. He needed to do this as quickly as possible so that passengers could escape. He noticed that they were very heavy, and his crew were having trouble dragging the boats across the floor. However, when they put a rug underneath it, he noticed that the boats were easier to drag.

After some discussion, we concluded that friction was causing the boats to be difficult to move, which was reduced when a rug was used. We then developed our own experiments to investigate which material would make moving the lifeboat easiest.
 
We used wooden blocks with rubber, sandpaper, wood, foam, or carpet bases.

 We used forcemeters to measure the amount of friction in newton (N).

We discovered that the materials that had the highest readings on the forcemeters had the biggest amount of friction. This meant that they would make the worst materials to help move a lifeboat.






Which material do you think caused the most friction? Why?
Which do you think caused the least friction? Why?