A trip to Mechanisms and Da Vinci
Engineering
A trip to Mechanisms and Da Vinci is designed for elementary school students and enables them to be transformed into small engineers. The children will watch a short video with Da Vinci mechanical constructions and operating principles.
At the end of the screening, there is a play-by-character discussion, and children explore concepts, phenomena and draw conclusions about the world around them. The children will implement a corresponding construction in the classroom, which will confirm the principle of operating they saw in the video.
By watching the world around them, children learn to wonder what’s going on in nature, how something works or what a device is. Through collaboration, small engineers use their skills, construct a simple model, and thus experimentally learn the usefulness of the mechanisms they encounter in their environment.
This program brings children together with the complex scientific and technological genius of Da Vinci.
The children will get to know his personality through the presentation of some of his constructions (Video) and they will realize the exceptional combination of Science, Mathematics, Technology and Engineering, which he used in the pioneering – for the time – constructions. Then they will build one of them and have the experience of operating it.
This “multi scientist” was recognized as a great artist in his era, but not as an inventor, because most of his theories and inventions remained unpublished during his lifetime. Many of these in the years to come were reproduced through the detailed notes he held.
Da Vinci designed the parachute, a kind of machine gun weapon, the submarine, a prototype flight system, robots and many more.
With original constructions, we find applications of simple machines (gears, pulleys, levers, inclined planes) in our everyday life and we look for solutions to specific problems, thinking as true engineers.
Experiential learning offers, in a entertaining and playful way, knowledge easily perceived and encourages children to reach and love the positive sciences and explore their inclinations to them.
Program info
- Age: Elementary
- Duration: 90‘