This is an idea I developed for a client for Yr8 Engineering lessons. Having tried the chip tray hovercraft layout in TEP (http://www.tep.org.uk/) I had problems getting it to work as advertised. Found out I had the wrong power supercapacitor. Even though the one i had was labelled 2.5v and 10F (From the official supercap kit from http://www.mutr.co.uk/) , it was a third the size of another from http://www.rapidonline.com/ which was labelled the same. Turns out the bigger one had three times the capacity (time able to run things). It was also the same price as the smaller one and worked with 15p motors from Rapid. Once I swapped for the bigger capacitor, everything became easy. This version uses sticky pads and connector blocks and can be assembled in about half an hour. The information on making it that the pupils received didn't quite work. On purpose, the design made the hovercraft a little rear heavy and they had to resite / cut the card cowl to get it working effectively. Look at my earlier posts to find out about the magnetic connectors.
This model was, of course, done in Sketchup. It tested my ingenuity to draw a decent chip tray in Sketchup (Try It!) but once everything was in 3D, it was relatively easy to arrange the parts for powerpoint slides, exploded views etc. I have taken the same approach to recent work for other clients. A wind turbine I have developed for KS3 is a 3D model which allows me to very quickly generate pictorial worksheets.
The backgrounds are black because the files are actually .gif files with transparent backgrounds. Saved and placed over other graphics in PowerPoint, they work beautifully but Blogger does not support this feature.
