rAs Kids📦↘️ 🪨 ↘️ 🗑️ / ✅
🎒 What you need
- a cardboard box, cut open flat
- tape or thorns to pin it, a stick, string
- a handful of maize grains: some fat and good, some small or broken
✋ Do this
- Cut a long strip of cardboard and fold the sides up to make a chute. Prop the top end on a stone so grain rolls down.
- Halfway down, cut a hole and hinge a flap over it with tape. Tie your string to the flap.
- Put a tin under the hole and a tin at the bottom of the chute. Two destinations — exactly like your two piles in module 1.
- You are now the sensor. Roll grains down one at a time. Pull the string for bad grain, leave it for good grain.
- Count how many you sorted in one minute. Write the number on the cardboard. That is your machine's speed.
- Now let a friend pull the string while you only call out 'good' or 'bad'. Feel how the deciding and the moving became two different jobs.
💡 Why it works
Every real sorting machine in a grain store or a cashew factory is these two jobs joined together: something that decides (a camera and a rule) and something that moves (a flap, a puff of air, an arm). You have just built the moving half by hand and been the deciding half yourself. Bolt a camera onto your chute and you would have the whole thing.
🔥 Challenge
Make your chute sort three ways instead of two. Then time yourself against a friend sorting by hand — when does the machine actually win?
📖 New words
sensorthe part that notices something — today, your eyes
actuatorthe part that moves — today, your flap
📦
Chute Engineer
Tap when you have finished this module.