Mr Pryor's Technology Pages

On this sheet you need to draw out a spider chart showing the various parts that you need to research, find out about and analyse BEFORE you can start to make detailed plans.
You will need about 10 parts or legs coming off covering the different aspects of the constrction and design. Set this out neatly and thoughtfully.

This is an example - you will need to adapt it to suit your project and intentions.
You will then have to cover these aspects in your research.

these are examples only - these may not be suitable for your project - adapt, reject, compose new statements.
Do not copy these directly......

1 To be completed for end Feb 2003
2 To be powered by one PP3 9 volt battery
3 To have all circuits fastened down securely
4 To have wiring colour coded
5 To have the main case completed for Autumn half-term
6 To have all switches, circuits, wiring etc insertable from the inside.
7 To have a main on/off switch.
8 To be made mainly from MDF
9 To be suitable for children to play with.
10 To have a delay of....
11 To flash light when....
12 To have a bridge height suitable for Scalextric cars to go under.
13 To have a central ball return system.
14 To have a playing surface X by X cm.
15 To be neatly finished off with....
16 To have a door or cover so that the circuits and battery are easily accessible.

You will need to get to 20 statements or targets for your project.

This sheet is as it says. Explain with pictures etc the parts or areas of your project that you will have to think about/plan/design carefully or may cause you problems. You may think that you will have none but this will not be true.
Try to be as specific as you can - do not simply write "I will have problems with electronic circuits" but more detailed such as making the timer time exactly to the second.
Set your work out neatly and clearly.
Use diagrams + sketches etc to explain your thoughts, ideas and solutions

Research (there are three aspects to this)

On this sheet you need to explain about matters to do with your project. ie if you are making a snooker table explain about snooker - have you had to adapt the rules for your electronic game?

If you are making a football game what is the aim of the game - any rules? Are there any differences between the real game and your version?

Are there any existing products that are similar to what you are making? Explain.

If you are making anything to do with children are there any health and safety issues that need to be considered? (there are - look them up/think carefully.

If you are making a testing sort of game - reaction time, hand/eye co-ordination etc what exactly are you testing, what are people like with regard to your project?

Alarms - what sorts of systems do houses have - how do they work - how do they sense intruders?

Golf - how is the game played and scored? What are bunkers etc.

These questions seem very simple and to a certain extent you are simply stating the obvious. Imagine that the reader is a 99 year old granny. You are explaining all aspects of your project to demonstrate your knowledge and in-depth planning and understanding. This approach is designed to pull in the marks. Electronics research comprising

Click on this to find out more about plastics

Click on this to find out more about forming and shaping plastics.

Click on this to find out more about bending plastics.

Click on this to find out more about injection Moulding of plastic.

Click on this to find out more about casting plastics.

Click on this to find out more about vacuum forming plastic sheet.

Family tree showing types of wood. Note that balsa (a very soft wood) is technically a hard wood. The terms hard and soft are to do with the type and family of tree.

Softwoods are evergreen coniferous trees. They do not loose their leaves in autumn and their fruit is a cone. A Christmas Tree is an evergreen softwood. If they were allowed to grow big enough the wood from them could be used as pine is used in house construction. Softwood trees grow at about 4 times the speed of hardwood trees. This is one factor that helps explain the price difference between hard and soft woods.
I this country pine is one of the most common types of softwood. Most is grown in plantations in Scotland and Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Finland) When the trees get to the required size they are cut down and processed either as wood or turned into paper. The cells of softwood fibres are shorter and have rounded ends.

There are two types of hardwood.
Temperate Hardwoods (Deciduous). This sort of wood comes from trees that loose their leaves in Autumn. The trees are described as broad leaved. Examples of these are Oak, Ash, Chestnut, Elm, Lime, Sycamore, Walnut, apple, Pear and many others. They grow in areas of temperate climate such as Britain, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Chile and Central America.
The cells of fibres of hardwoods are long and needle shaped. This tends to make hardwood timbers more elastic than softwood timbers. The trees are generally slow growing, especially if large pieces of wod are needed. This can make certain types of wood expensive and hard to find as hardwood trees are not cultivated as a crop as softwood trees are.

Tropical Hardwoods (evergreen)These timbers coe from broad leaved evergreen trees of tropical and sub-tropical forests of Africa, Burma, India, the amozon Basin, parts of South America, the East and West Indies. Tropical hardwoods(Teak, Mahogany, Ebony, Obeche, African Walnut, Rosewood) are used in the furniture industry, shipbuilding, billiard tables and cues, veneers*. They are often fairly dark and as most has grown in dense forests the trunks of the trees are tall and unspoint by branches.

Ecological Issues. Ideally if a tree is cut down it should be replaced with another so that as much timber is planted as it harvested. In many (often third world countries) forests are cut down to produce farmland, the timber sold but is not replaced. The farmland is not used sympathetically and soon looses its nutrients and effectively turns to desert. Some of this is caused by richer countries being unwilling to pay a price for timber that allows for replanting and proper care of the land.

*Veneer is a thin (0.5 mm) slice of wood that is glued onto another type of (cheaper or more stable) wood. MDF and Chipboard are often sold with a thin layer of real wood glued onto both sides. This looks just like real wood (because it is real wood!)
Advantages; Available in large pieces (up to 1.2 m x 2.4 m sheets) It is stable, this means that it does not warp in damp conditions, it does not expand or shrink much with changes in the humidity. It is also affordable.
Disadvantages; snob value, it can be cracked or chipped off leaving the base material exposed.

Veneer can also be made of sticky back plastic. This can be printed to look like wood or be made in any colour. It can be wiped clean and so is often used for kitchen unit doors. However on close examnation it does not look real.

Click on this to find out more about wood and wood based materials.

Click on this to find out more about resistant materials

Click on this to find out more about different types of wood.

back to top
25 Metals

Click on this to find out more about metals.

How it works and what it will do

Plans for/details of...

How I made it

Testing and changes An important section. Do not miss this out.

What testing have you done? Mention everything from seeing if marbles run down tracks to seeing if circuits work as planned.
You need to include the results.

The finished project

Read this carefully and make a good job of this sheet as it carries quite a few marks.

This sheet should explain what you have done, how does your work compare to what you expected/hoped/predicted/planned.
If you were to make it again what changes would you make?
Read your Specification Sheet carefully (sheet 5). These were your intentions, your aims, your targets. Does your finished project live up to these? Include figures, sizes, times, diagrams etc.
Go through each point on your specification. Explain whether your finished project meets this point. If not why not, if it is better than you intended or you had to change your mind then explain this.

If things did not turn out as intended this is the space to explain why and so pick up marks you might have lost earlier.

What not to write..."I have enjoyed making my project, I think it is good."
The project might be good but the evaluation will score zero.

This sheet gives you general information about writing an evaluation.

This second sheet gives you examples of specifucation statements (you can redo your specification if you need to) along with matching evaluation statements.

This sheet is for you to explain about safety both for you as the maker but for the user of the project. This is particularly relevant if you have made a toy or something for a child.

This sheet is an important one as it carries easy marks just for this sheet.

This sheet is easier to do if you have seen the video about making Ford cars in the 1920s. Watch it carefully, we may miss some bits out as they are not relevant to us at this stage. Concentrate on the way in which the factory owners planned the work, simplified the tasks, making the assembly of the car quicker, cheaper, easier, using workers with fewer skills and yet paying them more.

The way in which you have made your project is called craft production. You have had to make each part, learn lots of skills and techniques and be good at them. You have only made one item.

Tomorrow the cooks will start making iced buns for lunch. They do not make these once at a time but in batches. They will estimate how many will be eaten and them make that number all at once, in a batch - not one at a time. Enough bun mix is made, put in blobs onto trays, cooked allowed to cool and then iced with the previously made icing mix. If they were made one at a time it would take too long and so they would be too expensive.

Batch production is not the same as continuous production. In batch production the batch will probably be made by a small team sharing out the jobs. It could also be the responsibility of just one person.
In a small bakery the baker would decide how many loaves of bread to make that day. They would make that number as one batch.
Lorries are generally not made in the same sort of quantity as cars. However one buyer might order 10 or 100 of the same sort at once. A truck maker might make a batch of trucks to complete that order.

Continuous production is the sort of production that you might find at Mr Kipling or similar large companies making the same thing in very large quantities. Cakes being made round the clock, raw mix going in at one end of the tunnel type cooker and coming out at the other end as cakes. This is fine where there is a known, heavy and constant demand for the product (in this case cakes.)

Mass production is where the assembly has been simplified so that no worker needs to be particularly skilled and the product can be assembled easily. Potential mistakes have been eliminated by making the tasks virtually foolproof. The partly made product comes to the worker who does their bit of the job to it and then it goes on to the next person for that person to perform their small simple task to the part completed product. No one person completes the whole job. Mass production is done on a production or assembly line.

The standardisation of parts has made mass production possible. One Ford Focus is much like another, most parts woud be interchangeable even for different versions. One AA battery is identical in size and performance to another. (Of the same type) . It does not matter what brand of battery is put into a personal stereo. If it is the correct type it will work. (Obviously Alkaline ones will last longer than zinc carbon ones.)
This seems obvious to us now but 150 years ago this was a new idea. Many engineering companies had own designs of nuts and bolts. (Design not size) Standardisation of screw threads only came abut when Joseph Whitworth invented the concept. We only have to cope with about 4 or 5 different types world wide now and the metric M series is dominant. (M2 bolts are those that fit the slide switches, many of you have used M2.5 to fasten hinges onto your boxes.) The arms industry was one of the first to standardise parts so that one size of bullet woud fit a range of guns, so that guns could be stripped down, the parts mixed up and then the guns reassembled. This was quite a revolutionary concept at the time.

Two of the men on the video (that you may not have seen yet) are difficult to understand but they talk of conditions, hard monotonous work but good pay for those times. They talk about the way in which work comes to you on a conveyorbelt or track. The worker was then expected to do their simple task to the part buit car. It then moved onto the next worker for them to do their job. Eventually after al the brief jobs had been done the car was finished. The tasks were designed to be simple and quck to complete. Workers would need minimal training. The cars were designed to be quick and easy to complete or assemble. They explain about working conditions in the Ford factory in Detroit (USA) They thought that the good pay made the bad and boring conditions worthwhile.

back to top

Contact Mr Pryor
Click the hand to go back to the home page