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Solar Boats

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The Solar Boat Challenge engages students in developing scientific inquiry skills by building, testing, and refining boat designs. Through manipulating variables systematically, students learn how adjusting one factor at a time enhances performance. The challenge introduces students to scientific concepts, including buoyancy, hydrodynamics, electrical circuits, and solar energy, with opportunities to explore the principles of forces, energy transformation, and propulsion. The culminating boat race allows students to analyse their results, compare findings, and draw conclusions about the most effective scientific approaches used in their designs. The program aligns with science content areas such as energy transfer, electrical circuits, and the role of collaboration in science, as well as design technologies concepts like sustainability, material properties, and engineering systems.

Key Concepts:

  • Sc​ientific Testing & Inquiry: Developing and testing ideas through experiments and observations to improve designs.
  • Forces: Exploring how different forces (e.g., thrust, drag, buoyancy) act on objects in water.
  • Energy: Investigating energy transformation from solar to electrical energy to mechanical movement.
  • Solar Electricity: Harnessing sunlight to generate power for the boat's propulsion.
  • Electrical Circuits: Building and wiring circuits to transfer energy efficiently.
  • Buoyancy: Understanding how objects f​loat or sink based on their density and shape.
  • Hydrodynamics: Examining water flow around objects to reduce resistance and improve speed.
  • Propulsion: Generating movement through mechanical force, such as a motor-driven propeller.

AC(v8) Curriculum Links

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AC(v9) Curriculum Links

Year 5

Design Technologies

Technologies and Society

Explain how people in design and technologies occupations consider competing factors including sustainability in the design of products, services and environments (AC9TDE6K01)

Technologies Context: Engineering Principles and Systems

Explain how electrical energy can be transformed into movement, sound or light in a product or system. (AC9TDE6K02)

Materials and Technologies Specialisations

Explain how characteristics and properties of materials, systems, components, tools and equipment affect their use when producing designed solutions. (AC9TDE6K05)

Investigating and Defining

Investigate needs or opportunities for designing, and the materials, components, tools, equipment and processes needed to create designed solutions. (AC9TDE6P01)

Evaluating

Negotiate design criteria including sustainability to evaluate design ideas, processes and solutions. (AC9TDE6P04)

Cross Curriculum Priorities & General Capabilities

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures 

First Nations communities of Australia maintain a deep connection to, and responsibility for, Country/Place and have holistic values and belief systems that are connected to the land, sea, sky and waterways. (A_TSICP1)

First Nations Australians' ways of life reflect unique ways of being, knowing, thinking and doing. (A_TSIC2)

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Last reviewed 22 November 2024
Last updated 22 November 2024