Hat Storage
Drawing full size hat shapes.
Cutting hat shapes in card
An aeroplane design for a material bag
The onion bag: The raw product
A paper "mock-up"
The finished "Onion bag" product
Syndicate – Room 14
Teacher: Yvonne Skinner
Room 14 worked with Peter Volker from Peter Volker Consulting Engineer Ltd.
Diary of a Hat Project
19 May
Mr Volker came and the children explained what the problem was with the hats. These were all listed. The children felt the problems were that hats got:
• Lost
• Fell off the hooks in the cloak bay
• Other children took them when they couldn't find their own
• Took up too much room in a desk
• Came off the backs of the chairs
• Were only worn for two terms
From here Mr Volker helped the children to brainstormed possible solutions. He explained that to come up with a suitable solution an engineer would come up with a design brief. The points they needed to look at were:
• Space
• Access
• Strength
• Easily found
• Hygiene
• Good looking
• Safe
• Cheap
He explained each of the above ideas and why they were important. Each child then had to draw a picture to show their solution to the problem. At this stage there were to be no conclusions.
26 May
Mr Volker also brought in a mock-up of an idea of his own to help motivate the children. He had a model of a wheel, rather like one which is used in raffles where people have a lucky number and the wheel is spun. After talking about his idea and how it fitted the design brief we looked at all the ideas that the children had come up with. They split into groups and rated each one according to the design brief. Realising that things were not going as planned we revisited our brainstorming and refocussed on the general ideas for storage cabinets, hooks etc. We had a look at what was available in the classroom. The children split into groups and had a look at two or three options to see which they preferred. The solutions they came up with were – using the existing newspaper cabinet, Velcro-ing the hats to the wall by the cloak bay with their names facing outwards so that they can be easily recognized and using a pillowcase over the back of a chair.
28 May
I got the children to draw their preferred solutions on full sized paper. They measured the shelf on the cabinet, cut out a newsprint shelf to those measurements and then cut out cardboard circles to the correct diameter of the hat. They drew around these on the paper to see how many hats would fit on the shelf. We went through the same process with the piece of available wall. The third group drew a picture of how their pillow case would look.
4 June
Mr Volker came and looked at their full sized models of shelves etc and then taught the children how to scale these down in size to fit on an A4 piece of paper with some interesting results. The children realised that the hats would not fit so they drew them rolled up and it still didn't work so they all discussed the problem and decided that two of the solutions would not work.
7 June
Mr Volker came and we revisited which ideas would work as the children could see that the shelving and Velcro ideas didn't work. One child was really quite insistent that her idea of the pillow case would work if it was changed more into a bag to go over the back of the chair. Mr Volker also introduced the idea of a hook on the side of the desk but it soon be came apparent to everyone that this idea wouldn't work as a permanent solution as the desks were put in groups and the groups changed from time to time so we decided to go with the chair bag idea. From there we needed to find a bag that would fit all the different types of chairs in the room and possibly in the whole senior area. We drew diagrams of chairs and took the appropriate measurements.
14 June
Mrs Murdoch, Emily's Mum, came to school and worked with a group of children while I worked with the rest and we took the measurements of the biggest chair and decided that with the use of elastic we could make a bag which would fit all the types of chairs. We drew out our own patterns on newsprint. Mrs Murdoch took her pattern home and made a chair bag which Emily brought back to school.
18 June
Groups of children worked together making mock-up chairbags out of the materials available in the room. We made some bags out of several thicknesses of newspaper and some from plastic and masking tape.
21 June
Mr Volker came back and saw our products. He related everything back to the original design brief and checked that it met each criteria. He showed the children how to go about the last part of the project which was looking at costs. He went through the process on the board explaining how you needed to work out how much material would be needed for each chair, the amount of thread and elastic that would be needed. He also explained how you would need to multiply these costs by the number of bags needed. We decided that some children would write to material shops to ask about suitable types of material and related costs.
One group was going to write to a child's father to see if he could find out who supplied the mesh for onion bags as Mr Volker felt that a mesh material would be good as it would let the hats breathe and also dry if they were wet. He explained how this idea fitted with the original brief. Later, during that week the children wrote to a Mum who worked at Spotlight, the Dad who was in charge of an onion packing business and to 128, a local dressmaking shop.
11 August
After the holidays Mr Volker came back to class and took a small group of children aside and worked out the cost of producing 30 chair bags using the onion bag sample that had been sent to the class from the Auckland company. The remainder of the class group worked with me to cost the production of a material bag.
There was no comparison in the costs:
- If made professionally the material chair bags for a class of 30 would be about $1000
- The onion bags for a class of 30 would be $20 per class plus a small cost to sew them. The cost per bag was calculated at 35 cents plus GST.
The children decided that the onion bag was the better option of the two as it fitted all the criteria and was much cheaper to produce. Even school wide the cost would be reasonable.
11 September
Two girls, Anna and Emma, presented the above findings in a power point presentation to the Home and School Committee members. They will be making a decision soon as to whether to go ahead with the project.
15 September
The four engineers who have been involved in the project came to a special morning tea and were presented with certificates and a petrol voucher.
Teachers Comments
I found it really interesting working with Peter as I learned more about technological processes. The children learned the importance of revisiting ideas and working to a design brief. They could see that their solutions had to be practical and workable. They learned to look at existing systems to see if they could be modified and when they couldn't, to look for new solutions. The children and I had the opportunity to work with someone who had more expertise and also a fresh approach and a different way of looking at the problem.
Engineer's Comments
An opportunity for me to get in close contact with today's primary school environment, and to make an effort and contribution to bridging the widening gaps that are developing between various categories of people as a result of specialisation and different backgrounds.
