Wheeling It In!
In this open-ended design activity, students use everyday materials—milk cartons, water bottles, pencils, straws, candy—to build small-scale transportation devices. They incorporate the use two simple machines—a wheel and axle, and a lever—into their designs. Student pairs choose their materials and engineer solutions suitable to convey pyramid-building materials (small blocks of clay). They race their carts/trucks, measuring distance, time and weight; and then calculate speed.
Figure 1. Sweet wheeling! An example student-designed transportation system.
An important challenge that engineers face is moving materials from their sources to construction sites. Transporting large and heavy materials over mountainous or sandy terrain can be difficult and costly. Even on site, it can still be tricky to move the materials to exactly where they are needed, for example lifting heavy materials to the top floor of a building under construction. Engineers often incorporate simple machines into their designs of real-world transport methods to efficiently and safely move cumbersome building materials to construction sites and locations within the construction sites.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Design a transportation system using a wheel and axle, and a lever.
- Modify the transportation system for speedier transportation.
- Understand how levers simplify the transportation of materials.
- Understand how the wheel and axle system simplifies the transportation of materials.