Today we started a new Phineas and Ferb science/technology study inspired by an episode called The Fast and the Phineas- the one where the boys use their mom's car to build a giant remote control car so they can enter a race. Max checked out the online game version of the show for us too and got to design his own car- but was a little slow in the race! While he checked that out the rest of us started to learn all about how to build a remote control car from the very cool Thames & Kosmos Remote-Control Machines kit.
For our first day we started off slow and learned all about gears, how they work, why we need them in our remote control machines and how to calculate where to place them as well as their gear ratio (how many times you have to rotate one gear to make another gear rotate). We watched a basic video about gears that we found online but it was voted as "really lame" by all the kids so no need to share that here! On the other hand, the Thames and Kosmos basic gear lessons were great.
We learned a bunch of new vocabulary today: gear, cogs, transmission (gear train), torque, gear ratio, pitch, pitch diameter, spur gears, bevel gears and idler gear. Then we used the kit to put together several different gear trains and calculate their gear ratios. All the kids got some hands on experience and by the end of the lesson we were all happy to have a basic understanding of how gears work and how to use them in our models.
The kit comes with instructions to make 10 different remote control machines- starting with a basic car- so we'll start giving those a try next time and learn a bit about how the remote part works too.
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