Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mrs. Enock and I'm delighted to be your design and technology teacher today.

Looking at mechanisms with leavers and linkages.

Now today's lesson is called, to use a range of techniques to begin to make our final idea.

So we've worked incredibly hard to explore different mechanisms and worked to create a final design for our persuasive picture.

And now is the time for us to begin actually making that final design.

I don't know about you, but I'm very excited to get started.

Let's go see what we're learning about in today's lesson.

In this lesson, you're going to need a pencil, rubber and ruler, some cardboard, which can include recycled boxes, scissors and split pins and some thing that you can push a pencil into like blue tack or a soft sponge, or Play-Doh, something that means the pencil won't damage the table.

Okay, in this lesson we're going to recap on the design brief.

We're going to recap on our final design and we're going to begin to make the final product.

Now, it's really important for you to realise that your product is going to look different to my product.

And that's because we've all designed something different and that's perfectly okay.

Once we've begun to make our final product, we'll then summarise our progress and the next steps.

Okay, in today's lesson, we've got key words.

Mechanism, mechanism is a device used to create a movement in a product.

And we've done a lot of exploring mechanisms. Lever, this is the rigid bar which moves around the pivot.

Our lever is going to be the single strip of card.

Linkages, these are the card strips that join one or more leavers to produce the movement that you need for your persuasive picture.

Design brief, design brief is the description of the product we're going to design.

In this case, the persuasive picture.

The design brief is important because it states how the project's going to function, how it's going to work to meet the needs of the user.

And finally prototype, we made a prototype earlier on in our design and technology making process.

This is the early sample, the early model we made that's built so we can test our concept.

We can test the way the mechanisms work.

Okay, it's time for us to recap on our design brief.

The design brief is, to design a persuasive picture with moving parts.

Now on the back of the picture, we want to make sure it is moving.

The picture must include a lever and the linkage to make that very important movement.

It must also be controlled.

The movement needs to be smooth and controlled and to help achieve this, we'll be using bridges.

on the front of the picture, it must be appealing.

It must look attractive to the viewer, and also on the front of our final product, the picture must be persuasive.

Okay, it's now time for us to recap on our final design.

Here's an overview of the final design that I did.

Here's a close up version of the front of the design.

Now this is the initial idea where I added where the lines of movement, where the mechanisms will be, the colours that I'm choosing to use and the characters that we'll be moving.

And on the other side, this is an example of the back of the moving mechanism.

That you can see I've got my measurements, but it's really important to know that it's still okay to change this if it's not working.

That's part of the making, designing and building process.

Okay it's now time for us to begin to make our final product.

Here's our safety warning.

You will be asked to use sharp scissors for the next activity.

So please go and ask an adult to be present before you start this activity.

Never use sharp scissors unsupervised.

So press pause, get all the equipment you need, and then come back for us to carry on with our learning.

Great, off you go.

Have you got them? Well done, just before we start going through making our final product, it's really important for you to recognise that the way I'm making the final product is just an example to help you see the learning process of making a final design.

It is most likely that your design will look different to mine.

So you can either watch the making process that I do all the way through before you begin yours, or you can press the video pause at any time, so you can make your final design alongside mine.

Okay, ready, let's get learning.

Okay, now it's time for us to start the final design making process.

So I've got the back of my card, which is actually a very pale blue.

And once I've checked that size, I've now got some card so we can make our leavers.

Now I'm using the ruler to measure out the lever.

This lever is two centimetres wide and it's really important to make sure that your leavers are straight.

And the best way of doing this, is by measuring it out with a ruler.

Once you've measured out what you need for your leavers, you can then cut them out.

For mechanism one, that the turtle will be on the top of, I needed a long lever and I needed a shorter lever.

Once I've done that, I'm then going to place the lever and just check that both edges are straight and you can make a corner.

And once you're happy with that, you can then place the two levers on top of something soft.

I've got some blue tack on top of a rubber and with your sharp pencil, carefully push down.

It's quite hard to push down, you have to give it a good old push.

There we go, make sure it's lined up and it's ready to push down.

Once you've made the hole, you're then ready to add your pivot.

We can put the pivot through, open the back of the pivot.

And there we have our first moving mechanism.

By a loose pivot and our two leavers.

Now, it's always a good idea when I'm making something, that I check my mechanism against the card of the background.

So before we start to commit of putting in the fixed pivot, I just need to check the range of movement that everything is where I want it to be, and once I've done that, I can then begin to make the second mechanism.

So you need to cut out the leavers you need.

I followed and measured based on my final design.

And it's quite nice to lay them out on the background next to each mechanism, before you commit to putting in the pivot.

So it's always great to see that overview, so you can see already, I'm adjusting and changing my process as I go.

once you're happy with where your leavers are, then you can make that lovely corner that, right angle and you can add the two loose pivots.

So this mechanism at the moment, I am making the loose pivots because they are not attached to the back of the cardboard.

We can add the second pivot.

So on this mechanism, we will have one input and two outputs.

There we go, by making the loose pivots.

Now it's really important to keep lining up where you want your mechanism to be before you commit to adding the fixed pivots.

So I'm just checking with my finger where I want the fixed pivot to be.

Now you'll notice, I've only started to do the rough sketch in pencil of the background and that is because it might need to change.

So a really good tip, is do not draw your full picture in pen.

Begin by sketching the background, just so you can roughly see where your moving characters are going to be.

And then I'm just going over with a nice black pen, the outline.

And as you can see, it makes such a difference to the boldness of the picture.

Once I'm comfortable with the front of the design, I've then got my blue paper and I'm going to actually attach that to the back of the cardboard.

Notice I haven't put a lot of detail in yet.

We will do that later in the making process.

Here we go, here's the mechanism.

So again, I'm lining it up, taking my time of where I want them to be.

Now you'll notice the leavers are longer than the page and that is because we need to have to leavers long enough to go through our cut slit before we attach the moving picture.

I've now put the mechanism at the back, and it's now time for us to add the fixed pivot.

So once I've got it lined up ready to go, I'm going to put a hole through the lever and the back of the cardboard, the picture scene, and that's what makes this a fixed pivot.

So pop that hole in, add the pivot of the split pin, open it up and I'm not going to worry about the fact I can see the split pin.

We will deal with that later.

And there we go, we have our first part of the mechanism with the loose pivot and the fixed pivot.

And now I have attached the second fixed pivot, you can see we've got our first working mechanism.

That's great, so the mechanism is on the back of the picture, and we need to make a way for it to go onto the front.

But you'll notice here, can you see what I'm adding? That's right, it's the bridge.

So once the mechanism is made, I'm adding the bridge to make the movement more controlled, brilliant.

I'm now checking where the fixed pivot needs to be.

So once I'm happy with that movement, I'm using my finger to check, then I can add the fixed pivot.

Now as you can see, my movement is not working very well.

So to add to the control, we need to add a bridge and that bridge will help our mechanism have a more controlled movement.

And there you go, we've got our loose pivot, our fixed pivot and our bridge to add more control, pretty neat huh? This was quite interesting, with the movement, I've decided to move my pivot closer to the loose pivot.

So even with this part of the design making process, I've decided to add the pivot closer.

Now that is giving a much wider range of movement, which will allow my turtle to swim in the water really, really well.

Now I'm not going to worry too much about that small hole.

I've got a great idea how I can cover that later in the making process.

It's quite important to point that out because it's always okay to change your work when needed.

Okay, we're going to pause the making process today because the point I wanted to get up to was to add the moving mechanisms. Let's summarise what we've done so far and have a think about the next steps in our final idea.

Okay, here's a summary of the progress so far and the next steps.

At the moment I began to create the background of the persuasive picture.

And I decided at the last minute to actually draw my design on a piece of paper and then stick it to the cardboard.

This just allowed me to have that little bit more confidence in drawing my picture.

I also made, and very importantly, changed my mechanisms to make sure that there was good quality movement.

The next steps in next lesson that we're going to do in our product design, is we're going to begin to hide the mechanisms using the card.

So that is the process of when we're going to put the lever into the front of the picture and then hide the lever by adding our moving pieces.

And to do that, we also need to begin to design our moving pieces.

So, now's a good time for you to pause the video and make a quick note of how far you've gone in your making process and be aware of what you'll do next time.

Once you've done that, press resume and we'll carry on learning together, ready, off you go.

Here's a very important question for us to ask ourselves.

During the making process, did you identify an area for development? Point to yes or no.

I pointed to yes, I thought it was so important that even though we're in the final stages of our making process, it's okay if we need to make those important changes.

It's part of the design and technology process and helps us be better designers.

So well done if you did that.

As I said, part of being a great designer is not being afraid to change and develop your ideas.

Okay, this is what we covered in today's lesson.

We recapped our design brief.

We recapped our final design and we began to make our final product.

We then had a summary of how far we've gone in our making process and we've identified what we're going to carry on doing next time.

I really enjoyed this session with you.

It's been so great to be with you as you begin your making process.

Remember, it's okay to develop and change your ideas so they work for you.

All that's left to say, is I'm very proud of you and goodbye for now, bye.