St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Having learned about the Titanic last week, the children in first class decided to undertake the challenge of designing their own boats.  First we brainstormed the properties of boats and we decided that they need to float, carry people and have some way of moving.  Then we discussed what types of materials would be good to use when building boats.  We concluded that materials such as paper and cardboard would be no good as they would get soggy.  Instead we would need to use waterproof materials such as plastic and strong materials such as metal.

The first step we took was to see what objects and materials would float in the water.  We had a quick scavenge around our classroom before predicting and testing the items we found.

Floating and sinking

We found that the items which were heavy and had holes did not float.  Materials like wood and plastic floated.  Our favourite thing to test was the orange.  It floated when it had its skin but when we took the skin off it sank.  We came up with the idea that the orange peel was like a life jacket with tiny holes which was helping the orange to float.

Next, we took up the challenge of trying to make our boats using only blu tack.  This proved quite difficult as the blu tack sank to the bottom when we tested it in the water.

Kyra made sure it was a fair test. She measured the blu tack using a ruler to make sure everyone had an equal amount.

At the beginning of the design process, we found that we were concentrating more on making our boats look like boats instead of making sure they could float.

After a while we saw some improvement when we experimented using different shapes.

Liam found some orange peel left on his desk and had a really super idea of how to make his boat float.  He was going to give it a life jacket.

Then we observed how long our shapes took to sink all the way to the bottom.  Flatter pieces took longer to sink.

After some time we finally got a boat floating for each group.  We made some alterations to enable them to carry some passengers.  We then tested them to see how many passengers (pieces of sweetcorn) they could hold before sinking.

Take a look at our winning team!!!

We took a tally of our five boats showing how many passengers they carried.  We drew a graph to show our results.

We really enjoyed making our boats.