Pirates can be marooned or shipwrecked. Left all alone on an island they would need good technical skills to solve problems. Our wanna be pirates learnt about the six simple machines today (I won’t tell you what they are, see how many your pirate can remember).
Here’s a clue, on the day we explored pulleys and levers. Our challenge was to build a fixed single pulley, nearly everyone achieved this. The second challenge was to make a single moveable pulley, that was hard, only one group managed to make this. Next time you are in our hall see if you can spot the mechanism with 5 fixed pulleys. (Clue – look up.)
We also had time to make lots of Knex models that used simple machines, this one took 3 groups to get it made.
Which simple machine can you see in the picture below?
Once we had a good understanding of some of the simple machines we tried the Rube Goldberg Challenge – to make our own machine made up of the six simple machines. Rube Goldbeg was an American cartoonist who was famous for the complex machinery in his cartoons – very like the Mechanical Harry book we had in one of our Curiosity Cafes.
This was my favourite Pirate day so far as I never had the chance to do these hands on activities when I was young and finally realised my dream of building a single fixed pulley!
Fakenham Junior School 