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Thanks Una, Iagree that Col James FitxMaourice would have had to have some serious engineering knowhow and probably had to use tose skills as he flew. I will probably use him, he’s just too good not to between his WWI and Civil War experience along with the West to East crossing and the Portlaoise Plane connection.
I teach in Co. Laois and found this list on the Laois County Council website. There are some very interesting people there, Col James Fitzmaurice’s story is fascinating but I’m not sure that I can call him an engineer even if he did work on cars and Ireland’s first plane (The Portlaoise Plane, 1912) as a schoolboy.
William Dargan (though he was born in Carlow and referred to himself as a Carlow man apparently) having designed and built Ireland’s first railway between Dublin and Dun Laoghaire is, indisputably, an engineer. He went on to build 1300km of railway throughout Ireland. He also built roads, the Ulster Canal and Bray Seafront Promenade. He has three bridges named after him (bonus points for the class, research these and mark them on a map of Ireland).
In module four, I set out a plan for examining bridges and building a bridge. I think it would be very easy to modify this to incorporate Dargan as the inspiration (using this video). The bridge would become a railway bridge, I have a set of wooden rails and trains that would have to be accommodated and supported by the children’s bridges.
There’s no end of information about him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dargan
https://www.dib.ie/biography/dargan-william-a2407
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/william-dargan-pioneer-of-irish-rail-1.2010783
Interestingly, DLR CoCo barely mentions Dargan while lauding the input of Charles Blacker Vignoles.
In my school’s locality (walkable) and a little wider (up to 10k) there is a wide variety of bridges including a road bridge on the main street, a smaller bridge mainly used for walking, canal bridges, an aqueduct, motorway flyovers, railway bridges. It is hard to look past this engineering challenge even though I may also look at building a bug hotel inspired by a local building.
I would engage children by showing them a variety of local bridges and well know bridges from farther afield, I wouldn’t be mad about that Carrick-a-Rede video to be honest, I struggled to see the bridge in it but the River Suck one was great. I would use many of the questions suggested in the wondering section and set a couple of smaller challenges, e.g, A4 bridge and/or an idea I saw for cocktail stick/marshmallow bridges for further investigation and discussion of bridges. I also used to have a game on my phone where I had to build rail bridges for ever wider and more complicated settings, something like this could be engaging and useful.
As a class, we would come up with a challenge, setting span distance, width and strength parameters and the children would design, discuss, build, test, redesign if necessary, their bridges.
Children would reflect on their designs and I would reflect on the overall challenge afterwards.
I forgot to say I also did a FIT count at home and would do these at regular intervals in school so that we could investigate whether our actions are working.
Having registered my garden with the All Ireland Pollinator plan, I now have a much better understanding of what is required to do this for my school.
Firstly, I would set up the biodiversity@’myschool’.ie email as recommended in the course notes. I would use this to register the school so that all teachers can benefit access to the site. As with my own garden, I would add the outline of my site (the school grounds) to the school profile using “Add Site Polygon,” – it took me a while to figure this out and in the end I had to resort to watching the very helpful tutorial video. When doing this for my garden, I was presented with a form (see attached image) where I had to measure my hedges, mow less section sections, herbicide use, etc., there are some additional sections for schools related to raising awareness. There are some good links with maths here – length, area, time. The form would work very well to show us where we are doing well and where we could improve – it could be used as part of a biodiversity display.
In my school, we are developing an astro pitch but are lucky enough to also have a good-sized grass pitch. Though this is currently in use as a play area, I am very hopeful that we will
be able to use some of it more for biodiversity projects when the astro is available.Hi Patrick, I started to use mirrors to help with symmetry a few years ago, I find the children become very engaged and have a greater understanding of the topic. Mirrors are a great way to show that N and Z are not symmetrical and also to have a discussion on whether a child’s own work is genuinely symmetrical.
Consider the hands-on mapping activity on creating map layers outdoors…
I thought the idea of using transparent material such as poly-pockets to make layered maps was great.
I would show children different maps online and introduce them to the concepts of layers, e.g., OSI maps with historical layers, available through Scoilnet and on biodiversity maps. I will show them the video on making a biodiversity map of a garden and explain that we will be making one of the school.
We will consider the shape of the school and children will discuss and attempt to draw it. The school is a very complex shape so after their attempts, we will look at the outline on Geohive, this will also be useful to see the shape of the school grounds.
We will consider which layers we need, for our map. (Base Layer, building, yard, shed, pitch, car park, flora, fauna, etc.) Different groups will be assigned to drawing different layers an areas of the school grounds can be designated as natural or man-made.
By combining different layers of our final map, the children will be able to see where in the school grounds is more biodiverse. This should allow us to plan a school or public area that is designed with biodiversity in mind.
Using the PDF https://esero.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Engineers-Week-2022-Gravitational-Waves.pdf as a guide, I would engage the children with the following trigger: Wave Behaviour – Mighty Owl Science which would lead to a general discussion (wondering and exploring) of waves.
Children would explore waves by making waves in trays of water and in pairs using skipping ropes. They would experiment with changing their waves using, e.g, more or less energy.
They could investigate with rulers, flicking them at the edge of their desks and varying the sound. Other suggested investigations from that document that I would use are It’s Alarming – Human Ears and It’s Alarming – Sound Meters. An additional investigation I would like to try is https://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/stereo-sound.
In taking the next step, I would use this video in addition to the one suggested in the document to explain gravitational waves. The designing a detector grid activity looks like fun.
Reflection
