Click to continue Children Challenging Industry Our experience from start to finish By Children from Horns Mill Primary School, Cheshire

Click to continue Introduction Welcome to this presentation about our involvement in the Children Challenging Industry project. At the end of this presentation you will know some more about what we've done and what weve learnt.

Click to continue Our first activity Before Mrs Andrews came we filled in a questionnaire all about plastics, including where we thought plastics would be produced. Some of the questions included in the questionnaire were: Circle the words that describe how you think plastics are made. At what kind of place are plastics made? Which job would you like to do at this place and why?

Click to continue Our first lesson On the first day we were given many different plastics. We had to sort them using a Carroll diagram. We had to sort the plastics into four different categories: flexible, soft, rigid and hard. Some of the objects we sorted were bubble wrap, bottles, a pen and a ruler.

Click to continue The floating experiment The floating experiment was also part of lesson 1. We had four small pieces of plastic. We had to decide whether the piece of plastic would float or if it wouldnt. We all had the same results. Piece 1 was expanded polystyrene (floated). Piece 2 was polythene (floated). Piece 3 was polystyrene (floated with salt in the water). Piece 4 was P.V.C (sank).

Click to continue Fragile parcel In our second lesson we completed an investigation called A Fragile Parcel. We had a Pringle and we had to drop it from a height increasing by 20cm each time. But the Pringle wasn't dropped on its own, it was put in a bag with a choice of hay, pvc, expanded polystyrene, bubble wrap, cotton wool, kitchen roll and sawdust.

Click to continue The results of the fragile parcel investigation Least successful Hay and pvc offered the least protection and the Pringle broke from a height of 60cm. Most successful The most successful materials were kitchen roll, expanded polystyrene and bubble wrap. These prevented the Pringle from being broken from a height of 200cm.

Click to continue Our final lesson Our last lesson was everyone's favourite because we were packaging eggs and sending them in the post to ourselves, hopefully preventing them from cracking open! We packaged the eggs with different materials, having to be aware of the cost and ensure that the packaging was reasonably priced but still successful in protecting the egg. We could buy card, masking tape, bubble wrap, expanded polystyrene and kitchen roll and had a £1.50 budget. We tried to make the best box to keep to egg from smashing.

Click to continue Receiving the eggs! We finally received the eggs and couldnt wait to see how they had travelled. Unfortunately several had smashed, but we felt this was not so much our packaging but more to do with the heavy handed postmen!

Click to continue Our visit to Solvay Our visit to Solvay came at the end of the project and we were able to see a lot of the processes that we had learnt about during our sessions with Mrs Andrews. For instance we saw how they produced CAPA, a type of plastic for a variety of purposes. We also learnt about the different jobs done in a plastics factory. Every one enjoyed our visit to Solvay, especially as we had to wear a safety jacket, helmet and goggles!

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(And many thanks to teacher Jonathan Melville for allowing us to use this!) Close this window to return to the case study