When going to class last Wednesday I was a bit nervous for our assignment that day. After reading the assignment online, "learn to make an electrical circuit that includes a motor and a switch", I was a bit nervous because I have never worked with any kind of wires or electrical circuits.
Upon arriving to class we were split up in groups of 2 to 3 people and were told that we were going to create a "Drawing Machine". We were showed examples of machines that past students made, they were all powered by a small motor and created with various materials such as cardboard, cups, drawing materials, tape, etc. When the machine is turned on it moves in a unique way and makes marks with the drawing materials attached to it. Our assignment was to randomly choose a word from a pile and make a drawing machine that accurately represents that word. My group of three chose the word "exhausted", at first we debated against choosing a new word, but then started to brain storm and were actually petty happy with our word.
We began by thinking of things that went along with the word exhausted, slow, sluggish and lazy all came to mind... then one of my group members said "A snail!". That's when the ideas started flowing. We started to sketch ideas on how we wanted our machine to look, how we would make it move and how we would incorporate a drawing materials.
We decided to take a cardboard roll and cut it in half for the base and then cut out a strip of cardboard to connect the two rolls and then cut a hole in it for the motor to fit. This way the motor would vibrate both of the cardboard rolls and (hopefully) make it move.
As we begun building the machine, we decided to make it creative and turn it into an actual snail by cutting out construction paper and constructing a head, tail, and shell. Then we thought we could attach thick string to the back of the tail and dip it into a tempera paint so that it made a snail like trail. As one of my partners and I were working on creating the snails body, our other partner was working of the construction of the circuit.
She was going to place the battery pack inside of a cup that the shell would be covering, and hot glue the motor to the cardboard hole. It was going well until the motor stopped working!!! We thought maybe a wire came undone, but no. When attaching a new wire it still didn't work. We actually couldn't find an exact reason why it stopped working, but we assumed that the heat from the hot glue interfered with the batteries. We had to take everything apart and get a new battery pack, fortunately we knew exactly how to reassemble the motor, cup and battery pack how we originally had it. Thankfully that only took a few minutes and we decided that instead of hot gluing the battery pack, we would duct tape the battery pack to the side of the cup.
Meanwhile we continued to create the snails band were trying to think of ways it could act even more like a snail and move slow like our word exhausted. We decided to give the snail a tired or sleepy facial expression and then began to brainstorm ways for it to move slowly, we thought about adding a water bottle cap to the bottom of the motor to slow it down by getting dragged on the ground, or even adding sponges to the bottom of the cardboard tubes. We ended up just adding the bottle cap to the motor and thought that once we added the shell it might weigh the motor down. We then added the snail into the motor and the strings onto the tail. I was very pleased with how our final product came out... the motor worked and the snail was too cute!
Next was to show the class, we set out a blank piece of large white paper, dipped the strings into tempera paint, turned on our exhausted snail and let it mark make. To our surprise it moved even SLOWER than we had planned for it to. It ended up working perfectly though and I was so excited! The marks it made were almost like a rainbow because the motors vibrations caused the snail to move in a circle. I think if the snail continued to move, it would end up making a full circle. I think this was a really great project and would be great to teach in a classroom of young kids. They would be able to learn about circuits and get to add their own creativity!
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