A small group of Year 3 students have been working on a design challenge they were set as part of a gifted online program.
The Scenario:
Imagine that an oil company has discovered a valuable oil deposit under where your animal lives. You have just two weeks to remove and save as many of your animal as possible. You don’t have many people though so it has been decided that trapping the animals and then going round and collecting them up for transport to a new area is the best way to go.
Your job is to design the trap using only materials from the list below (these materials are substituting for the timber, plastic etc. that you would have in real life). You need to make a trap that will operate without a person controlling it to capture but not injure your creature. The trap needs to be humane, it should contain the animal for up to 24 hours without damaging it in any way.
Your design must have at least two of the simple machines listed below as part of the structure:
¨ Pulley
¨ Lever
¨ Inclined plane
¨ Wheel
¨ Axel
They labelled their final design using Seesaw:
First, I had the students research the animal they were going to design a trap for. Here is their information report:
Once the students had found out some background information on the animal they were going to design their trap for, I had them follow the engineering design process to complete their projects:
