Chain Reaction: Create a crazy contraption
This high-octane engineering workshop gets teams collaborating to create big, wacky chain reactions. Building simple machines, including pulleys and levers, the class will experiment with forces such as friction and air resistance to invent a solution to our wild challenge.
Students will be working scientifically to:
- explain that unsupported objects fall towards the Earth because of the force of gravity acting between the Earth and the falling object
- identify the effects of air resistance and friction, that act between moving surfaces
- recognise that some mechanisms including levers, pulleys and gears allow a smaller force to have a greater effect