Hydraulics and Pneumatics Projects

At the beginning of December, I assigned my grade 8 students to build a machine / model using hydraulics or pneumatics. They are due this week, and some have already come in. So far I am extremely impressed.

At the end of the week, I'll take pictures of them all to show what projects they built, but so far there has been an excellent selection of machines. From the simple yet elegant dentist chair to a powerful crane to a digging machine, bridge, and a mechanical claw. I have all the projects displayed at the side of my classroom. Whenever other classes come by, they look, play around with the machines, and are all jelous that they weren't assigned this project. The students that didn't hand in the projects yet are all very inspired by the creations and some even have decided to scrap their original ideas/models to make better more complex designs.

An interesting observation:

The boys are more into this project than the girls. The stereotype continues... boys are the builders, the physicists, the engineers. Girls on the other hand did much better on the previous project on the cell organelles, when a presentation was involved. Even the "best girl students in the class" did simple models, nothing too challenging, nothing too complex. While the boy teams really went out of their way to create something extraordinary. I only teach 100 students, so maybe this is not the best statistical sample, but really, I am amazed at how obvious this is.

Actually I'm quite dissapointed in this outcome, because I am a "girl physicist" and I thought I would inspire the girls to be the same. It is possible that I did inspired my girl students to enjoy physics, however there might be something more innate in the female brain than I can inspire. Maybe girls just don't like machines, don't have the same 3-D visualization required to think of awesome, complex structures . For example I, myself, don't like to watch TV shows about construction projects / machines, while my husband is all about that. Am I only interested in physics because of the fun of the math? Or am I really interested in how things work?

I can't wait until the rest of the projects are handed in. Every project gives me hope that these children are actually interested in science, and that it's actually worth it to put in effort to continue to teach them, think of interesting ways of presenting the material. This time around, I can tell that the students really had fun doing SCIENCE!

UPDATE: Here are some pictures of the machines.

A Crane - One of the best projects! Click here for a description of how to make this one.


This was the best bridge - good design, didn't break easily, esthetically pleasing.


Dump Truck


Mechanical Hand - excellent design worked great initially, but started leaking. Most students loved this one!


Hair Salon Chair - very simple yet very well done.