Design, Build And Test a Boat

Hi, I'm Jared, welcome to "Fun Science Demos". The big idea today is design, building things. And what are we going to design and build? A boat. A boat needs to be able to do two things: float, and move through the water. Believe it or not, each one of these boats yes, they float, but they also move through the water using different forms of energy. This boat uses magnetic energy. Next we have chemical energy, then we have electrical energy, heat energy and this boat uses the energy of moving air. So where do we start with this design challenge? I like to start by having my students draw a picture of a boat they think will float and move through the water. Anywhere from two to five pictures is a really good starting point. Remember students can work by themselves or they can work in a group. But the next step is to pick one picture and build that boat. These boats looks so nice, but it's important to realize that it took a lot of redesigning, rebuilding and retesting to make these boats work. It's design. Boats float and I said they retest them and rebuild them. Where does all that happen? Well, I have a very scientific piece of equipment called a rain gutter and I call this the Rain Gutter Raceway. I actually have a small section here for us to view but in my classroom I have a 10 foot long section of rain gutter that we fill up and we race our boats and test our boats and redesign our boats and rebuild our boats. All within a very comfortable Rain Gutter Raceway. So now let's get wet and take a look at these five boats in action. We're gonna start with the easiest one, the magnetic energy boat. I drop it in the water and you can see it's gonna flip, which also could be part of my redesign. I use my magnet; I'm not touching the boat, I'm driving it down the channel- the raceway-of the rain gutter and you can see it move. the next one's the chemical boat. I'm gonna show this with water, add some fizzy tabs and watch that thing power down the rain gutter. Simply adding water, filling it up. Now, the interesting thing, we talked about redesign, the amount of water I add actually has an effect on how well the boat works. I'm gonna drop in the fizzy tabs which is actually going to create a chemical reaction. You can see it happening. I have to do it rather quickly. If I put in too much water, my boat might not work as well. And you can see it slowly putt-putt down the rain gutter. Woo! (Students in background) "Oh, there it is." "Happy little bubbles." And now for boat number three, our electrical boat. Now something interesting happened here. When the students designed this, they stuck this electrical motor- it's just a little fan- on the back in the boat and they found that the fan and the electrical motor was too heavy and the boat just really didn't float well. So they actually put a little tiny weight in the front of the boat to make it float better. Watch this thing move across the rain gutter. So I'm gonna turn this on and it slowly motors across the rain gutter. (In background) "Slow and steady, look at it glide away." "Mustache goes by". "This is the best run you've had so far. Look at that thing. Nice job!" Boat number four is the most complicated boat. It's actually made out of a little pie tin that we bent up and cut up to form our boat but the motor, that's the complicated part. It uses heat energy. We actually heat up water, the water creates steam and that powers the boat. To make that is the complicated part. The students took a soda can and cut it up, bent it up and created this tiny little chamber that can hold water. And then they put straws into that little soda can and put glue- a special kind of glue called epoxy-all over it to seal it up. Huh, it sounds complicated, it actually is. And then you have to fill that with water using a dropper. It takes a little bit of time. The water's in the straws, now we need to heat that water. How? A candle; a birthday candle. We're gonna light the candle and let the water heat up. You can actually hear it heating. I'm going to use my little lighter here to help things along, and it takes some time for it to heat. (Students in background exclaiming over boat.) Our last boat, boat number five uses the force of air under pressure. I'm gonna blow up this balloon and that balloon is going to force the air out at the straw and move it down my Rain Gutter Raceway. Does it matter how big I blow the balloon up? Hmm, part of redesigning. Put it in my Rain Gutter Raceway and off she goes. (Students in background) "Wow!" "That's so cool." "Look, it's still going." "Woo!" "It might make it." Now, if you noticed, some of these boats went down the raceway quickly, and some not so quickly. Some didn't look like they moved much at all but they did move. How fast your boat goes or how far your boat goes, it doesn't matter. This is a design challenge. All we care about is, can you make your boat float and can you make it move through the water? To do that you have to retest and rebuild and rework. That's all a part of design. Science has a really neat name for this designing and reworking and building things They call it engineering. All students benefit from building challenges and engineering. This is just one of them. Science is so cool or should I say engineering is so cool. Don't forget to check out our links in the video description for more ideas on engineering challenges. Thanks for watching.