This unit in our Design classes we are exploring Sustainability in all our MS classes, with a focus on the home as a context for our 8th graders. Alex and Jamie have been sifting through the design library that Jason Reagin had the foresight to order for us, and which is based on the one at Branksome Hall Asia by Aiden Hammond. They’ve found really interesting ideas in terms of materials, biomimicry and repurposing waste.
One inspiration we came across was Micaella Pedros’ Joining Bottles project, which repurposes plastic bottles as joining hardware for furniture construction.
Her other projects (which are what I’m jazzed about today) include a gravity-powered fan, inspired by a light using the same technique. If you’re familiar with grandfather clocks you already have an idea of how this works. Here’s her fan:
For me, this one is too labour-intensive. It looks like it would run – at best – for about ten minutes before needing to be reset. I remembered that my grandparents had a cuckoo clock on the wall that only needed to be reset every few days, so surely there’s some optimization possible here. I’m thinking about reduction gearing and how to make this run longer without being reset (and perhaps with a switch to turn it on and off).
Which reminded me of this:
It was absolutely mind-blowing to see this in person. You strangely “get it” from a physics perspective, but moving around it and seeing the turning of the gears go from rapid to imperceivable reinforces the power of gearing and what’s possible.
Showing the Machine with Concrete piece to one of my design students who is in robotics with me was a joy – he was gobsmacked. I kind of want to bring this to my robotics students and see if we can replicate Machine with Concrete with our VEX motors and setup, and then what we might apply from that project to making gravity-powered machines that run for days instead of minutes.
All this has me thinking about how dams are gravity machines, and wishing my understanding of physics was better that I could head-estimate how much power we could be generating with these simple machines and some gearing. I have some more learning to do.
