Task 17

Materials and tools for a working group:

paper boxes, skewers, straws, wheels, polystyrene balls, plasticine, adhesive tape (preferably double-sided), rubber bands, balloon

In the previous task, the pupils found that objects, for example, can be moved by escaping air. The teacher suggests the pupils to use this idea to move a toy car. In order to make the task more interesting and to make the presence of friction more recognizable, their task will be to create the car itself from available materials, which the teacher will introduce them: paper boxes, skewers, straws, wheels, polystyrene balls, plasticine, adhesive tape (best double sided) and rubber bands.

Pupils can create cars intuitively, or the teacher first asks them to try to agree in a group on a common design of a car. They draw the design and then try to construct it. Similarly, to other design challenges, pupils are also comparing the cars they created with each other and exploring what causes that some of them are moving better than others. Usually, this is because the wheels are fixed on the axle so that they do not cause high friction (for example, by inserting skewers into straws in which the axes with the wheels move more freely, without greater friction).