Stop Freewheeling Using Friction!
Wheelchair ramps help people with disabilities access all buildings and structures with stairs.Copyright 2019 Chongkian, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nurul_Muttaqin_Mosque_-_Wheelchair_Ramp.jpg
In this maker challenge, students use the engineering design process to design a covering for a portable wheelchair ramp for their school. The design must be easy to use, and allows people to move up the ramp easily and go down slowly. Students have a $20 budget to use for materials. Students conduct research on different materials to use that reduce or increase friction, evaluate proposed solutions that best meets the above requirements, build and test prototypes, revise and improve their designs, and report their findings to the rest of the class.
- assortment of materials to experiment with reducing and increasing friction, such as cardboard, paper, rubber, and sandpaper
- fabrication tools and adhesives to work with the above materials such as scissors, glue, and masking tap
- textbooks (used to create an incline for the ramp)
- toy model of a wheelchair
- lab notebooks and pens
- poster paper and markers
Contributors
Kayla Sutcliffe
Supporting Program
Multidisciplinary Research Experiences for Teachers of Elementary Grades, Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida
Acknowledgements
This curriculum was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under RET grant no. EEC 1711543— Engineering for Biology: Multidisciplinary Research Experiences for Teachers in Elementary Grades (MRET) through the College of Engineering at the University of Florida. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Copyright
2019 by Regents of the University of Colorado; original © 2019 University of Florida