Making Things Move, Building Shelters Primary i-D&T

Today is the last round of this year's British Pedal Car Championship.

It's about taking a car and racing it around the track

as quickly as you can with only human power.

It's theoretically non-contact but there are a few bumps and scrapes along the way.

As the last race of the season, the championship is going to be decided

today and there are a number of teams hoping to win that top spot.

I think car five,

the BAR car is probably going to win the championship today.

Today's favourite is probably number five.

Favourite for the overall has to be number five.

The main goals of this car was to firstly build in reliability

and then really to make a car that was as fast as possible,

as safe as possible

but at the same time wore the driver out as little as possible.

This weekend hopefully we're going to go out and win the race

and that will actually see us win the championship.

On the car, the driver puts his feet onto the pedals,

turns the pedals with his legs

which drives the chain.

This turns the two axles...

..which drive each of the wheels that are attached to the axles.

Where the axles turn, we have two holes,

which we need to make these bolts on the wheels actually lock into

so that when the axle moves, the wheel rotates as well.

So just put the wheel on.

Now if I turn the axle, you'll see the whole wheel will turn as well.

The front wheels move differently to the back wheels.

On our car, the front axles are fixed

and what happens is the wheel itself moves

because it has bearings inside.

So on the rear wheels, the wheels are actually attached to the axle.

The axle and the wheel move together.

On the front wheels, the axle is fixed.

The wheels have bearings and the wheels are able to move separately.

Come on, you two.

We're about halfway through the race now, we're currently leading.

There's still a long way to go so it's a little bit too early to say that it's in the bag.

Obviously if you're going fast, you also need to be able to stop quickly.

On our brakes, when you pull the handle

it actually pushes apart the two brake shoes.

Brake shoes have got a friction surface here

which actually touches against the hub and slows the wheel down.

You can see that, like this.

The steering mechanism has got two rods that control the two wheels

so that as you turn the central steering column,

it turns both wheels at the same time so when you're going round a corner,

both wheels face in the same direction.

We've currently got eight minutes left.

The race itself could well come down to a sprint finish on the last lap.

The body is built from a combination

of carbon fibre and fibreglass.

Carbon fibre is very good for the body work of a pedal car

because it's very lightweight but very, very strong.

It's designed to be very aerodynamic,

to take the air above the driver and around the driver.

It's better to have a nice streamlined, rounded shape

at the front and at the tail, rather then a big flat nose at the front.

That's why we bring the body over the front of the driver

so their head isn't sticking out into the air flow.

Two minutes!

Well done, Martin.

'I'm a really happy man, won the championship,

'long time a-coming. Really happy.'

THEY CHEER

'The car's made a real difference, it's actually made the team'

much stronger and it's been reliable, it's finished all the races.

It's made a big difference to us.

I wanted to create something really beautiful and mystical and magical

to appear in the street as if by magic.

We'd never taken on anything this big and this complicated.

DRAGON ROARS

The process of getting in the dragon,

we have an order that it goes in, otherwise it just doesn't work.

When you're designing and building something as large as this,

it's really important to bear in mind the weight of it

and the materials you use, just make them as light as possible.

We've put a big counterweight at the back in the tail.

So we have a very simple mechanism here

that we've used to open and close the jaw,

and it's using a normal, common-or-garden bicycle brake cable,

you can see the cable there.

Winnie is just going to pull the cable now

and you see the mouth is opening and closing.

Just behind, I've put in a bit of bungee, a bit of bungee elastic

and that's what pulls the mouth back into position.

The brake cable pulls it open and the bungee snaps it shut.

So these are our beautiful dragon's eyeballs.

We make these work moving left and right and up and down

by connecting them electronically

to some little machines called servos.

I'm turning this lever here, on the right,

and then that movement

travels all the way up these wires and into this little box here.

DRAGON ROARS

We've learnt a lot from the previous Mars Rovers.

We've seen what problems they've had -

indeed one of them is stuck in sand at the moment.

So we've tried to factor that into our design to make this the best Rover yet.

The Mars yard is designed to be our primary test facility.

The sands here are very carefully chosen such that we think

they're quite representative of soils we'd find on Mars.

The idea of this is that we do all our testing here

so when the Rover gets to Mars, we know how it's going to behave and how to control it.

So Bruno has lots of ways to move around Mars. He can follow curves

much the same way that an Earthbound car would do.

He can spin on the spot in what we call a point-turn move.

But something that's unique to this particular mission

is that we can wheel walk.

We can walk on our wheels, much like an insect would,

which is a more stable way of moving if we get into trouble.

When I type in the command, I want Bruno to do from the laptop,

that's sent over a wireless network, the same you'd find in your house

actually, to the back of the rover, and that interprets it.

The onboard computers interpret that command and give individual commands

to all of the wheels to move in a certain way.

My name is Claire Wilson.

I was born fully sighted but, as a child, I had childhood eye cancer

which meant that I could see very well until I was about seven,

seven and a half and then I lost it very suddenly.

The time is 1:02pm.

When you're visually impaired, you can do almost anything

that anybody can do but you just have to find

different ways of doing some of the things.

I'm able to do all sorts of everyday tasks that people do.

I can cook and do my own cleaning and things like that.

Probably one of the most difficult things in everyday life

is actually identifying things.

Baked beans.

'Baked beans.'

'Dog food.'

'Tomatoes.'

'Soya mince.'

'Garlic puree.'

In most cases, when something crops up as a problem,

there is a solution to it, with a few creative minds involved.

Is your dinner OK, Whitty?

The way we started the construction today

was by first setting out where the corner posts of the shed would be.

It's very important that we get this first stage done

as accurately as possible, so that in the later stages

we can follow the design properly and everything fits

where it's meant to.

Filling.

In some situations we want to join two pieces together,

but where they join together is going to be quite weak so we do

something called a splice connection, where we put the two pieces together

and then we got an off-cut, an extra piece of wood

that was lying around, maybe half a metre long,

and we laid that across the joint where they join together

and nail it in.

If we put enough nails in and we separate them properly,

then hopefully this middle section will be as strong

as the rest of the beam.

If we had, for instance, just one nail through a joint,

the two pieces of wood could actually pivot

with respect to each other, which we don't really want.

So we want at least two nails, better to have three.

Next, we constructed the side walls as panels

and then these could be lifted up

without actually having to dig foundations

for all the other columns.

The next stage is to add a little bit of

what's called horizontal stability.

This means if you had two posts like this and the wind blew across,

they could just fall over,

so we add what's called bracing, which goes diagonally across,

so when we have a force pushing,

the force goes down and through the bracing.

So actually, we're doing what we call triangulation.

Instead of a square, we're making triangles,

and a triangle is the stiffest and strongest shape that we can have.

Next, we add rafters which are the sloping members on the roof.

Again, we put some bracing to add some more horizontal stability,

make the roof nice and rigid.

And that's the basic structure done.

Yay!

Shelter is very important for people who have lost their house

due to either natural catastrophes like floodings, earthquakes, tsunamis

or it could be because of war and displacement.

Shelter is going to provide you the privacy for your family

so you can stay together,

but also it will give you a roof to protect you

against the elements - the rain, the snow, the heat and so on.

This is where we have on display different types of structure.

There are three different types of shelter that we provide.

The most basic one is made of rope, wooden poles and plastic sheeting.

Then we have the tent,

and finally the semi-permanent structure made of wood, poles

and other kind of materials that we can find locally.

The material that we are using has to be able to answer

to different types of climate from cold climate to very hot climate.

The basic shelter that we can provide

to a population, to a family is made of plastic sheeting...

..rope

and wooden poles.

This is the basic frame of the shelter.

So we have one and two wooden poles,

four pegs, a rope.

Those ropes to give the strength of the structure.

Next stage will be to put the plastic sheeting on the frame.

Here we have now a basic emergency shelter

where people can spend their first night protected from the rain.

Of course, this is very basic

and we will need to upgrade it for longer use.

The basic components of that tent are

24 aluminium poles of the same length,

12 connectors,

15-20 iron pegs,

some ropes.

Then the canvas,

the shade nets to shade the tent from the sun.

So we are now in the tent, this tent is made for medical activities.

Here is made for surgery and medical consultation.

The basic framework of the tent, we have plastic carpet on the floor

which is easy to clean and it's waterproof,

so you don't get humidity coming from the ground.

This tent is designed to be erected within half an hour.

You arrive, half an hour after,

you can already start performing your medical operation.

The plastic in the whole tent is easily transported

because we can fold it in a very nice way,

so you reduce the volume and you can compact it into a simple bag.

This whole tent can fit into four of those small bags.

Those four small bags can then go into a bigger bag

that will contain the tent and all the options,

meaning that we can easily airlift

or transport those tents to any place in the world.

Semi-permanent is the transition

between emergency shelter or tents

and more permanent construction made of bricks, rocks or concrete.

We use material that can be found locally.

The advantage of the bamboo compared to the wood - in terms of structure,

it has the same resistance, you can build huge things just with bamboo.

It also has less impact on the environment if you chop down bamboos

rather then wood, because it's a more sustainable agriculture, the bamboo.

One of the key issues with the plastic sheeting is the way you

fix it to a frame, because it will be fixed mainly with a nail,

but if the nail is not attached to something firm

on the plastic sheeting, with the wind and the time,

the plastic sheeting will move and detach itself from the structure.

Therefore with a very simple technique, we are going to fix firmly

the nail to the plastic sheeting through, for instance,

the re-use of a bottle cap like we have here.

Here we've been using an old truck tyre to make hinges for a door,

it's very low-tech and it works.

We have to be adaptable and use

all kinds of material that we can find locally around the world.

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