Structures
Structures come in many forms, both natural and manufactured. Our own skeletons are structures as are trees and plants. Manufactured structures, including, bridges, cars, buildings and furniture are all around us in the made world.
Structural Engineers must ensure their designs are safe. They use their knowledge of construction, materials, physics and mathematics.
The purpose of a structure is to:
carry the loads for which they were designed
do so without collapsing or breaking in use
hold all parts together in position
Framed structures
A framed structure in any material is one that is made stable by a skeleton that is able to stand by itself as a rigid structure without depending on floors or walls.
Today, Year 5 continued our Design Technology Project – frame structures. We decided to make bird hides for Year 5 to watch wildlife.
We have already completed investigative and evaluative activities where we investigated and make annotated drawings of a range of portable and permanent frame structures. Then we completed focused practical tasks based on techniques for joining frameworks. Next, we designed and made a small scale frame structure.
He are a few of our small scale frames.
Today, we started creating our full scale bird hides.
Now we need to critically evaluate our bird hides against our design specification, intended user and purpose.