Engineering with Year 7
Our Year 7 Technology students have been hard at work designing and building CO2 dragsters, combining creativity with scientific principles. This hands-on project allowed students to explore concepts such as friction, mass, energy, aerodynamics, and thrust, applying these ideas to develop high-performance designs.
Students completed detailed engineering reports, documenting their design process, analysing performance, and justifying their choices. These reports included thorough research, time management, sketches, and evaluations of how each factor influenced their car's speed and efficiency.
The project not only enhanced their technical skills but also encouraged innovation and deep class discussions, culminating in an exciting race day to test their creations! Have a look at some of the awesome C02 car photos!
Student reflections below:
At St Andrews, during our second semester of Technology, we worked on CO2 car projects. We designed and built our cars using tools such as coping saws, rasps, flat files, and sandpaper. The coping saw helped us cut out the basic shape, while the rasp was used to roughen and refine it. We then used the flat file to smooth the surface before sanding the edges to make them neat. Once the shaping was complete, we held a test race outside in the Gould area, setting up the track along the pathway. Each car was powered by a CO2 canister attached at the back, which propelled it toward the finish line. If a car flipped over or failed to record a time, we re-ran the race to give everyone a fair chance. After the test run, we returned to the workshop to finish sanding and start painting and designing our cars. When our designs were complete, we held the official race, where everyone’s hard work came to life.
-Nouriel Naeim
At St Andrews, for our technology semester two we made Co2 cars. We started off the subject by learning about things like aerodynamics, drag, friction and Newton's laws of motion.
After researching things that assisted us on our cars we started planning on making them, we started by doing some sketches to get a rough idea of what we wanted our car to look like. Then we went to the workshop where we took our pieces of wood and slowly started carving out the shapes of our car by using the coping saw to shape it and files and sandpaper to smoothen down the car, finally we painted and raced the cars.
Overall researching, developing and testing the Co2 cars was a very exciting experience where we were able to do things we had never done before, like use the machines in the workshop or carve wood into our cars.
- Edward Zhang
Congratulations to all students for their outstanding efforts, and a special shout out to our Top 3 Fastest Cars across the year group during this rotation:
- 1st Place: Chloe Looker — 1.123 seconds
- 2nd Place: Julian Reyes — 1.224 seconds
- 3rd Place: Jeremiah Pelayo — 1.284
Ms Catalina Valdivia
Technology Teacher