Cafe

Our cafe has been making exciting progress over the last couple of weeks. The premises has grown, there is talk of introducing a live show once it officially opens and several students have been involved in preparing extra components, including signs and price lists which are being prepared and edited into usable menus for the customers.  

We encourage students to be 'brave writers' and have a go when they are unsure of the spelling or numerals in their piece of writing.  Here several students have first spelled the sounds they could hear in the word, and then referred to an exemplar to compare with and edit their own work.  

Construction

A problem occurred on the Terrace last week. A soccer stadium was built next to the cafe, which naturally needed seating, and we discovered that there were not enough chairs to go around for both venues.

The children decided that the best solution was to build extra chairs out of the big blocks, but soon discovered that they were a little unstable for spectators to sit on.  

Both groups combined for the rest of the session to solve the design problem of how to stabilise the seat. We discovered that the base was the first thing that needed to "feel safe", and that when the orientation of big blocks was changed to an overlapping pattern it made a more stable base than when all the blocks were vertically aligned.

The next problem was the back rest. Even once the seat base had been built up sufficiently the back still felt unstable when someone sat and leaned back slightly to test it. To solve this we added more blocks in varying orientations to the back of the chair.  


We experimented with adding more blocks to "build it up" but found that adding them in different directions did not always result in a more stable chair. Specifically, building it up vertically made it feel less stable than a design with a lower back, and that adding support at the back of the chair to make that section thicker helped considerably.