What do tangrams have to do with simple machines?
Room 9 had to make their own tangram puzzles from a single piece of balsa wood. Which simple machine did they use to make the puzzle? A wedge. Wedges separate things, either two different objects, or splitting one object into two like knives do. Because Mr Wong likes martial arts and zombies, Room 9 also learnt about the difference in usage between swords (thin, light, cut, fast) and axes (thick, heavy, chop, slow).
Once Room 9 measured, ruled, and erased guide lines, they needed to cut the pieces out of the wood. They found out that slicing / cutting takes several passes along the same line to cut through something.
After cutting out all of the pieces they had to try and make a house and a yacht before challenging themselves to do other shapes.
Here is the album for more photos:
This week room 9 has been working on gears for inquiry. We had to get ourselves into groups of four and Miss Kirkpatrick will give us a work sheet to fill out. Miss Kirkpatrick also showed us the four gears. The green had 8 teeth, the yellow had 16 teeth, the red had 24 teeth and the blue had 32 teeth. After we finished filling out the work sheet we got to use two wood with holes in it and put two pegs in the holes. You then have to put the gears on the pegs. You also have to make sure that the gears are connected. We then had to find out what will happened if you have a red gear and a yellow gear and the yellow gear is the driver and the red gear is the driven. Then you have to turn around the yellow gear around one full turn and try and see how far the red gear goes. The answer was three quarters.
