Grade 3 – Moving Monsters

At the end of last term, the Grade 3’s completed their Design Technology models of ‘Moving Monsters’. This unit focused on developing the children’s understanding of control through investigating simple pneumatic systems. We chose to make dragons as we had been reading lots of stories about dragons in our Literacy work. Click on the movie below to see one of our dragons in action.

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Want to see more of our dragon movies? Then click on and also learn about the pneumatic systems that help to control them.

Pneumatic systems use air to make them work. We began by looking at familiar objects that use air to work eg recorder, whistle, bicycle pump, balloon, coiled party blowers and looked at how they they were designed.

We then constructed a simple pneumatic system by joining a balloon to 5mm tubing and then to a washing-up liquid bottle.

What do you think happened to the air when we squeezed the bottle?
What do you think happened when we let go?
What do you think happened when we put a book over the balloon and then squeezed the bottle? Do you think it was able to lift the book?

Why not try this investigation at home. Or visit this great website to learn more

Next, we constructed an alternative pneumatic system by joining two syringes with a piece of plastic tubing.
What do you think happened when the plunger of one syringe was pressed in?

We also tried using syringes of different sizes. We noticed that the large syringe only moved a very small distance compared with the small one.

Following this, we looked at how balloons or syringes could be used in conjunction with simple levers to control movement and experimented with these ideas by:

-placing a balloon in a small box with a lid so that when inflated it raises the lid

-using a card hinge to attach one of the syringes to a lever so that it can raise and lower the lever

-exploring the effect of moving the syringe closer to or further from the pivot point

Using and apply the knowledge they now had, the children then each designed and made a model of a dragon that had moving parts controlled by a pneumatic system. Some children chose to have moving mouths, some tongues and fire, some wings and other’s eyes. Everyone started off with the same Styrofoam burger box but each dragon soon become unique. We often had to change and adapt our ideas in order to overcome problems with our designs, materials and with fixing components, but it was really exciting when we tested our models and they worked.

All in all this was a really fun and challenging project – a roaring success!

These movies may take a little while to download, but we think they are worth the wait…maybe go and make yourself some popcorn and come back in 5! Watch out though – some of these dragons sound really hungry!

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[qt:/movies/G3movingmonsters734-130407.MOV 320 256] Look closely at my wings!

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