My Bridge Summer Learning Journey Tekau Ma Wha

Today for the Summer Learning Journey I made a bridge. It was a beam bridge with a few things holding it up underneath. I thought at first that I would not be able to stand on it. I could in the end though!

We learnt about tension and compression. Tension is a force that stretches something and compression is a force that squeezes something.

There were four different bridges to choose from; beam, arch, truss and suspension. The beam has a long bit that people drive or walk on and it had long sticks that went all the way down into the ground below. Arch, like its name, has an arch under it to keep it up. Truss has two sticks going down into the ground and also has a lot of triangles on the top stopping people from driving or walking off. Suspension, has two sticks going through the bit people drive on and being connected by curving wires.

I enjoyed making the Duplo because it was really easy and it was not at all hard. I could not find anything tricky in this task because it was so easy and I could understand it really well!

Next time I would use paper to make the bridge and balance rocks on it to make it a bit more interesting than a piece of wood on a bit of oversized lego.

Thank you for reading my blog, here are my slides:

Here is how a beam bridge works. C is compression and T is tension 

Lego Balloon Car

Today we had a lego challenge. We had to choose to make a lego bridge, a lego zipline and a lego balloon car. I chose to do a lego balloon car. I used a lego car base, a few random pieces of lego and a balloon. 

I learnt why the car moved forward when I let go of the balloon. It goes forward because of the "newton's third law of motion". This means for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. So the action of the air rushing out from the balloon is pushing against the air behind the car. The reaction is the air behind the car pushing against the car with the same force causing the car to move forward. 

My favourite part was trying it out because I did not know if it would work. It surprised me when it worked! It also went really far and almost fell of the table!

I found it tricky to make the car because it was kind of hard and it challenged me. It was kind of hard because the balloon would rub against the green bit and make the balloon not blow up. So I found some more pieces and built it up a bit more and I could blow up the balloon more.

Next time I would add more legos because it would make the car heavier and might make it go slower. I also would move my chromebook back so you could see where it landed.

Here is my slide:

Duplo Day

Today I thought that I should play with Duplo instead of playing on computers. I made the little yellow digger from the book, a castle, a train and a gym. My brother helped me make the digger.
I enjoyed making a castle.
I found it easy to make a train.
I found it tricky to make the gym.
Next time I would change the colour of the flowers on the castle.
My digital learning object shows that I can take a photo.

Here is the digger:

Here is the castle:

Here is the train:

Here is the gym:

Diplodocus lego

Yesterday I could not sleep. Before I went to bed I started making things out of lego my mum got for me. I made the body then I had to go to bed. So when dad left the bedroom, I turned on my lamp and got to work. There were LOTS of extra pieces!
I enjoyed going to sleep that night.
I found it easy to attach the eyes.
I found a tricky to do the white things for the feet because they didn't connect properly.
Next time I will change where the extra pieces go.
My digital learning object shows that I can take a photo of my work.