This week in Year 4 we made progress on our Design and Technology project: Mechanical Systems: Making a slingshot car.
We began by discussing the different modes of transportation people used before the inventions of engines and how the car has evolved over the last 100 years. We discovered that cars now have doors, a roof and windows. They are also faster, safer and can be made for a range of different purposes such as racing, off road driving, carrying loads and taking families from A to B.
Cars also are designed to push through the air as easily as possible to make them fast and use up less fuel. Air resistance is responsible for slowing cars down. We demonstrated this with an experiment involving a piece of paper which was flat and a scrunched up ball of paper. Both pieces of paper weighed the same but the flat piece of paper fell to the ground slower as it has to push more air out of the way to reach the ground. Cars need to do the same and we thought about this during our design process.
In our first lesson we built the car chassis! This involved sticking together lollypop sticks to create two squares for the base of our car. The chassis needed to be very sturdy as it was the base for our car. We also has to measure and saw some dowels to size to create the axel and then attached the wheels.
Our car would be powered using kinetic energy. We added a launch mechanism using a paper clip attached to a lolly stick which also acted as an extra supporting truss and a launcher using a lollypop stick and an elastic band. We can’t wait to test it!
Once out chassis was ready, we discussed how we could design our car body. We designed our ideal car using sketches of the birds eye, front and side view. As a class we came up with design criteria for both the chassis and car body such as creating a secure base and a light car body to help with air resistance.
We are looking forward to bringing our designs to life next week when we make and add our car bodies.
What did you enjoy most about our Design and Technology lessons this week?
I loved it 😊 it was soo fun 🤩 I wish i could drive a real car one day I hope everyone else enjoyed it too
I really enjoyed the sawing it was soooo fun 🤩 i used a saw🪚 for the first time ever in my life
I really 🥰 doing DT because we get to learn how cars are made.
I liked the DT because we could make our own car!
What I loved about these lessons was learning about how to make a sling shot car because it was a really fun experience and I got to saw wood!😊
What did you enjoy most about our Design and Technology lessons this week?
What I enjoyed the most about our Design and Technology lessons this week was that we got to learn how to learn how to saw and make a car.😊🪚🏎