Technicraft Week 3

The Year 8’s at St Patrick’s School went to Mr Clark’s technicraft room for our third week at Pakuranga Intermediate. When we put our bags down we pushed all four tables to the four corners and grabbed our chairs towards the centre.

We all sat in a circle and started our class activity with a warm up.  This is a practise that Mr Clark, uses at the beginning of each class.  This particular warm up involved playing ‘Fruit Salad’ and ‘Whiz;. In Fruit Salad we were all given a name of a fruit. I was orange and when the person in the middle shouts a fruit name all the people who were given that fruit name in the circle have to run to a different free seat. They can call two fruits as well and call out Fruit Salad. When they call out Fruit Salad this is when the game starts to get hectic. Every fruit runs around and tries to find another seat that wasn’t theirs in the previous round. After this game we played Whiz and it was a game about listening. I wasn’t very good since I was the first one out during the real game.

Afterwards we learnt about positives and negatives and how they work. When Mr Clark finished talking we grabbed our projects that we started the week before. The project we worked on was an LED frog. When a fly touches the memory wire the LED lights light up. We had to solder on wires onto copper tape at the back of our frog. I had to solder on my wires and attach memory wire into another type of wire for the battery. As I soldered on my wires I accidently burnt a bit of my hand and had to rush to the tap to run cold water over the burn. Once the battery connected and the two wires were attracted to each other my LED frog eyes lit up red. We took turns putting batteries into each others frogs and watched the lights light up. Some lights were red, green, orange and yellow. About the whole class finished their frogs by the end of the lesson.

At the end of the lesson my pink frog with hearts and red LED eyes was complete. I think in the next lesson we’ll be starting another exciting electrical project for our fourth week of technicraft.