Over the years, Engineers have been working on improving the key factors that determines the quality when manufacturing cars that are mostly used in racing contests. As the journey of these tests have not ended yet, it was agreed on some of the main factors that affects the performance of a race car. In this lesson, students will be those engineers that will get the chance to hold several tests and record their findings on a simple car model made from the LEGO Education robotics toolbox WeDo 2.0!
Lesson Objectives
- Students will be able to describe the importance of Engineers role at car's manufacturing factories.
- Students will be able to form a definition for the physical term Speed in relation to car's performance.
- Students will be able to hold a test to determine the impact of several elements in a car's performance and present it to the class.
Materials
Vocabulary
- Speed
- Acceleration
- Pulleys as Mechanical configuration
Media Resources
Lesson Plan
Pre lesson preparation:
- Divide students into groups (each consists of 3) and place and stick on each table the metric ruler so that students can use it as a reference at the test, and highlight a starting point.
- Place a LEGO Education WeDo 2.0 kit on each table with a laptop/tablet, along with one Student worksheet per group and some extra papers, pens.
- Ask the students to read the article "Auto Racing" before the class time.
In class lesson steps:
- Start your lesson as shown in the Teachers manual for the speed lesson by LEGO education by playing the Video at first and then discuss the idea of the racing cars that are used in contests as following:
- Auto racing (also known as car racing, motor racing, or automobile racing) is a motorsport involving the racing of automobiles for competition .In auto racing, the racing setup or car setup is the set of adjustments made to the vehicle to optimize its behaviour (performance, handling, reliability, etc.). Adjustments can occur in suspensions, brakes, transmissions, engines, tires and other factors.
- Speed is the rate of motion, or the rate of change of position. It is expressed as distance moved (d) per unit of time(t). As in SI units, it's meters/second.
- Acceleration is defined as the rate of change of the speed. It is thus a vector quantity with dimension length/time². In SI units, acceleration is measured in meters/second².
- Introduce the lesson for the students as they are Engineers in a car manufacturing factory and their mission today is to report what are the changes that we can do to make the car model prototype made from the LEGO Education kit go faster. Inform the students that in this lesson they will be given a 15 minutes to build the car instructed in the software( From the Guided projects menu -Speed and skipping directly to the Build phase, and inform students to ignore adding the motion sensor as it will not be used ) and then ask all students to program as following so that the electrical features are all the same and only the mechanical configurations will be adjusted during the test: