Last week of tech

This is the last week of tech and I want to write about how much tech there is around us. I was looking around my house and before tech I never knew there was so much tech in it. In the dishwasher there are wheels that make the racks slide. There are I beams under my table. There are electrical circuits inside the walls of my house. I have learned a lot in these past few weeks of tech and it can translate into real world.

Mechanical light switches

This week for the last week of tech we are building light switches. First thing we need to do is get the parts for the switches. Then we need to design them to make them look good. Then we start assembling it. We start gluing the pieces together that will make the gears spin correctly. We need to drill chamfers so that we can put screws into the light switches. At the end we glue the switch to the base so that we can hook it up to a light switch and use it.

Parallel circuits

In the last blog post I talked about series circuits. I told you that they have one path for the electrons to flow through so if one led breaks then the entire circuit doesn’t work. A way to avoid that is a parallel circuit. It is still a circuit except it has two paths for the electrons to flow through. It makes it so that if one led doesn’t work there is still a path for the electrons to flow through to power a second led light.

Series circuits

In technology we learned about circuits, breadboards and more things. A bread board is a way to test your circuit before you send it to a company to make the component. We learned that in a series circuit there is only one path for the electrons to take and to flow through the light bulbs. In that circuit the electrons have one path to flow so if one led light is broken then a second led wont light up.

How bike brakes work

For this week I wanted to explain something and teach people about how brakes work in bikes. First I want to say that bike brakes work almost the same as car brakes except more heavy duty. So there are mainly 3 different types of bike brakes but well only go over 2 of them. The first one is the most common and they are called caliper brakes. They basically have a metal area near the inside of your tire and when you want to brake there is a piece of rubber or a material that grabs on the the tire and slows the spinning down. Its the same thing in a car almost where the break calipers grab on to part of the tire and slows it down. The second part is hydraulic disk brakes and those are the ones on my bike. They are the ones that work the best but there are also normal disk brakes they work because there is a metal thing like in the caliper brakes that something grabs onto but its in the middle of the tire, and hydraulic brakes involve oil and more complicated things.

“Automatas”

In tech we have been learning about how automatas work. If you don’t know what it is it is basically a device or a piece of hardware that its moved by something called a cam. It is something that is round or not round and when it spins the bumps make a stick move and it makes whatever you want to move. There are cams everywhere you go there are cams in cars but we’ll talk about this another time. Cams are very complicated but can be very simple at the same time.

The tech behind a bike

This week I wanted to write about the tech inside a bike. You probably think that bikes are just a very simple thing with no tech behind it, but it turns out that there is a LOT of tech behind a bike. First lets talk about how the bike moves the bike is made up mostly of one frame of metal, some handles, and a seat. The way the bike moves is the chain. The chain is very important, the chain gets moved when you pedal and it moves with something called traveler that keeps the bike chain in line. Then there is something on the tire that grabs on the chain and when the chain moves the tire moves. There are also many types of brakes for bikes and even cars but well talk about that another time. Bikes are very complicated but very simple at the same time.

“Levers”

In a week of technology we learned about simple machines. The first one we learned about was the lever. There is a effort, fulcrum, and a load. For example a crow bar. If it is trying to pull a piece of wood that is drilled into a frame there are all the effort which is the hands, the fulcrum which is the back of the crow bar touching something else which is giving more power and the load is the piece of wood. Over all levers are a very simple machine but it is very helpful.

Week 1 of tech “adhesives”

This week in tech was our first week, plus two days of the week were virtual and snow days. We didn’t start a project yet but we have been getting ready for our project. I chose to write about adhesives because we started learning about them. Adhesives are basically a sort of glue and material to bind things together. Adhesives are very important because to make things you probably need to glue things together. We learned that the first glues were in the early ages made out of animal hide to help paint in caves.There are many different types of adhesives and ways to use them.

Final tynker project

For our last week in computer tech we were using tynker again. We were making a project that the person using it interacts with it. What I tried to do was a multiplication quiz for my younger sibling. I was successful but it wasn’t random. I was working on random questions but I ran out of time. I saw a project that was explaining scientific notation and I thought it was pretty cool. It explained it first then it let you try a question. I think overall these project were pretty cool and were a good learning experience.