| Lesson Number |
At-Home Activity
(Parental involvement and/or supervision are essential while
students carry out these activities.) |
| Getting
Started: Designing Products |
Examine the shelves used for various
purposes around your home, looking for ideas you might adapt to
help build the CD rack in the Try This activity for this
lesson. |
3.1
The Life Cycle of a Product |
Look around your home, especially in
the basement, garage or closets, to find forgotten items that could
be put to use by your own family or by someone else. |
3.2
Product Testing |
Does any household appliance need to
be replaced in your home? Consult a consumer magazine to determine
the features your family wants and to see how the various brands
rank, based on the tests conducted. Remember, however, that many
consumer magazines are designed for the American market; brands
may differ between Canada and the U. S. |
3.3
Case Study: Planning to Fly |
What can you find around your home or
neighbourhood that was assembled from a kit or built from a set
of plans? Who completed the project? Ask them what difficulties
they had and what they might do differently next time. |
3.4
Stability |
- Look around at home for examples of furniture, appliances,
decorations or other items with a centre of gravity that might
not remain over the base during use (e.g., recliner chairs,
rocking chairs, portable dishwashers, adjustable arm lamps).
Examine these items and see how they are constructed to ensure
that they do not fall over when the perpendicular line from
the centre of gravity is no longer within the base. When full
racks of a loaded portable dishwasher are pulled forward, the
dishwasher is extremely unstable and could easily topple forward.
Manufacturers solve this problem by installing retractable legs
that extend from the floor to the floor to prevent tipping.
- Observe how a cat uses its centre of gravity to advantage
when jumping and playing.
|
3.5
Case Study: Stabilizing the Tower of Pisa |
Ask family members and friends what they
know about the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the experiments conducted
there. Compare what they tell you with the material you have researched
in this lesson. |
3.6
Career Profile: Building Sets for Television |
Look for examples of virtual sets on
news and public affairs programs. Examine fan magazines of your
favourite TV shows to find information on the sets used. |
3.7
Explore an Issue: Planned Obsolescence |
Look around your home and make two lists.
On the first, list the products that are usually replaced as a result
of planned obsolescence; on the second, list products that are replaced
for "justifiable" obsolescence. |
3.8
Forces and Structures |
Examine heavy items around your home.
Decide where and how you would apply force to these items in order
to safely move them from place to place. |
3.9
Inquiry Investigation: Applying Force |
Prepare a plan for renovating part of
your home that would require you to demolish one or more walls or
install additional doors or windows. What lies within those walls
that you must be careful to reroute? (Possibilities include heating
ducts, plumbing, electrical cables, telephone wires, etc.) |
3.10
Loads |
Examine closets in your home and identify
how many different types of clothes hangers they contain. Test the
structural strength of each type by determining how great a live
load they can handle. |
3.11
Design Investigation: Determining Factor of Safety |
Consider what kinds of modifications
you would have to make to your home to make it accessible to a physically
challenged exchange student who would live with your family for
a year. |
3.12
Tension, Compression, Torsion and Shear |
- Examine a drapery rod, a venetian blind or a shower curtain
rod to determine the types of forces acting on or within them
when the drapes, blinds or curtains are in various positions.
- Examine any appliance you may have with a retractable cord
and determine the types of forces acting within the cord in
different positions.
|
3.13
Choosing Structures |
- Look around your home and make a list of various types of
structures.
- Wearing old clothing, test a raw egg's strength by applying
a uniform compression to it.
|
3.14
Finding Stability in Symmetry |
Re-examine the items that you identified
in the first At Home activity for Lesson 3.4 (i.e., items
with a centre of gravity that might not remain over the base during
use). Using your new understanding of the effects of symmetrical
design on stability, investigate how the designers of these items
dealt with the problem of the forces set up within these asymmetrical
structures. |
3.15
Design Investigation: A Stronger Beam |
Look around in the kitchen and bathroom
for any structures that include reinforced components (e.g., countertops,
cabinetry, cutting boards). |
3.16
Design Investigation: A Stronger Structure |
Identify the types of beams that are
used in the building where you live. (Basements in houses, stairwells
in apartment buildings and garages, and ceilings in community centres
and arenas often have exposed beams.) |
3.17
Strengthening Structures |
Examine concrete roadways, bridges and
other structures in your area for signs of deterioration. What is
being done to reinforce or repair them? |
3.18
Design Investigation: Getting Under Foot |
Revisit the basements, stairwells, community
centres or arenas that you examined in the At Home activity
for Lesson 3.16. Examine the structure of the floors in these buildings
by looking up at the underside of the floor above you. |
3.19
Case Study: Fasteners and Function |
Examine tool chests, toy boxes and junk
drawers around your home to determine what kinds of fasteners are
used on them. If you find several glues and adhesives, note the
range of uses each has and the types of jobs for which each is recommended. |
3.20
Design Investigation: Designing a Childproof Container |
Locate as many childproof containers
as you can in the home. Classify the with respect to the types of
products they contain and the ease of operation for an adult (you). |
3.21
Making Bridges |
- Using atlases, encyclopedias, travel brochures and other resources,
locate pictures of various bridges and list the different types.
- Keeping in mind that a bridge is simply a structure that connects
two points that have a gap between them, locate as many bridges
as possible in your neighbourhood. (A power line allows a squirrel
to cross a road; a board can be used to cross a ditch, etc.)
|
3.22
Design Investigation: Bridging the Gap |
Use the pictures you found during the
At Home activity for Lesson 3.21 to get ideas for your bridge
design in this Lesson. |
| Design
Challenge |
Note to parents: Since the Design Challenge
may be used by teachers as a performance assessment opportunity,
parents should consult with the teacher to determine the appropriate
degree of parental involvement in their child's completion of the
Design Challenge. |
| Unit
Summary |
The Unit Summary in your textbook
lists all the learning expectations you have covered in the unit
and identifies the specific lessons in which the knowledge and
skills have been developed.
You can use the Unit Summary to help you create a personal study
guide in preparation for an end-of-unit test:
- Copy down the list of learning expectations from your textbook.
These are grouped under three headings: Understanding Concepts,
Applying Skills, Making Connections.
- For each learning expectation, locate the appropriate lesson(s)
in the unit where the expectation was covered. These are listed
at the end of each expectation (e.g., 2.1).
- Flip to the appropriate lesson(s) for each expectation and
make study notes of the key ideas or skills you learned.
|
