This is a very simple and yet very effective exhibit. Basically just a fan blowing upwards past a gap into a clear tube. Visitors can make different flying machines out of paper, polythene, paperclips or whatever, put them in and see what happens. It is an exhibit which can captivate a one year old or a PhD engineer.
We have made a variety of these, and the top of the tube can be up to 3m high
This has all of the features of the gear wall exhibit but it is horizontal rather than vertical. You can make gear trains, reciprocating motions, waving hands etc. With the added feature of making things spin in the centre.
Mechanisms are fascinating, and extremely important to our world, from power stations to electric toothbrushes. You may want to build a complicated machine or just make some gears turn, or anything in between. Allowing you to learn about mechanisms as you play.
It is based around magnetic hubs which hold gears and pulleys in between them.
This basically consists of a monitor and piece of polariser. However the monitor has had the outer piece of polariser scraped off. This means that all the light that gets through the rear polariser can always get through. But if you look through a polariser you can see the picture again. Rotating the polariser by 90 degrees will of course let through all the light which was previously blocked, so inverting the image.
This shows how a piece of physics can be used in something we use every day.
The ball run consists of a steel sheet, that you can use magnets to attach various tubes gullies and other devices for the ball to run down
To get the ball back up to the top there are a series of blowers set back into the wall (so you can bridge over them with the tubes and build even more complex ball runs).
Our version uses ping pong balls that can be blown up tubes, and then controlled on their way down by channels, that stick to a steel wall.
It has been incredibly successful, and will fascinate 2 year olds, PhD engineers, and everyone in between. Fans in the tubes blow the balls back up to the top which gives an immediate task - to make the balls keep circulating. Doing this once is quite easy, doing it reliably is much more difficult, and involves using trial, improvement, and empirical learning, all vital for real engineering.
This is our latest version