This semester, our Year 6 students have been busy in STEM, re-purposing old equipment to build fan-driven cars. The hands-on activity required students to call upon a breadth of skills, including collaboration, critical thinking, planning, creativity and working technical skills.

Through re-purposing old equipment, students completed the following four tasks: 

Task 1: Salvage usable parts from old desktop computers, then locate and destroy the hard drive/data. This task involved developing an understanding of the internal workings of a computer, how to use specific tools, and how to safely remove certain components.

Task 2: Design and build a cart out of foam destined for landfill. Test and modify cart.

Task 3: Retrofit a reclaimed fan to the cart to be a form of propulsion. Identify and rewire the correct wires to allow the fan(s) to be powered by a small battery.  

Task 4: Race the fan-driven carts. As an extension to Task 4, using Makey Makeys, develop a timing system (program and mechanism) incorporated into a cart track to automatically time each run.

Adam Lloyd, Head of Mathematics