Today the year 4 children, Mrs Targett and I were lucky enough to go on a trip to Wiltshire College in Trowbridge to see the prototype of the car which, in 2016, will hopefully break the land speed record - 1000mph! It's called the 'Bloodhound' and is not yet built (hence the prototype).
The children were involved in making a car from k'nex, powered by air and testing it to see how far and how fast it would travel. One of W&B's groups came second in this test and their car travelled the equivalent of more than 272,000mph!
The children were involved in making a car from k'nex, powered by air and testing it to see how far and how fast it would travel. One of W&B's groups came second in this test and their car travelled the equivalent of more than 272,000mph!
The children also took part in some drama where they had to pretend to be the different components of the car such as the fuel (peroxide - this is what you would use on your hair but much, much stronger!) the air, the rocket and the jet engine.
We also had to test our reactions by dropping a pole and trying to catch it whilst doing other actions such as rubbing our tummies, standing on one leg and singing 'Mary had a little lamb'! This was to help us to understand how quick the driver's (Andy - a fighter pilot) reactions are! We had varying degrees of success!
The final activity was 'telemetry'. This is an automated data collection and measurement process. The children had to 'tell the story' of the line graphs to demonstrate their understanding of them. They had to move car which was linked via Bluetooth to a computer and a graph was automatically generated. It was a brilliant way of helping the children to understand how to read and generate line graphs (continuous data).
We had an amazing day! It is a shame that year 5s were not with us too. However, we will all do some follow up learning on this next week and, Year 5s, the Year 4 children will, I am sure, delight in telling you more about our day!
See you all tomorrow.
See you all tomorrow.