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Welcome to TAME Engineering Adventures! Every month we strive to bring you two engineering activities (this month we will provide one warm-up activity and one practice competition activity) that will help you challenge your students with hands-on learning.

This October's Engineering Adventure is to construct a crane! We provide a terrific video from Curiosity Machine, which stars a Latina engineer illustrating both a simple crane and a complex crane with pulleys and a crank. Next we share the 2012 State Competition Engineering Design Challenge! It's perfect for a pre-Divisional warm-up.

It's a great way to get your Club members to start thinking like engineers in preparation for our STEM Competitions.

Have your students watch this video from Curiosity Machine, which stars a Latina engineer illustrating both a simple crane and a complex crane with pulleys and a crank. Provide supplies like string, disposable cups, tape, and drinking straws, then challenge your students to decide how they would build a crane of their own.

If they get stuck, have them watch how Curiosity Machine built a simple crane with this video, and a more complex crane with this video.

This adventure is taken straight from the TAME competition archives to help your students prepare for our Divisional STEM Competitions.

The objective is to design and build a crane to deliver marbles to the top of the very tall Aggie stadium, Kyle Field. The objective is for each team to design a versatile crane that scores the most points based on several criteria: the height that the crane can lift a load, the ability of the crane to pivot on the vertical axis, and the maximum load it can lift. The team with the highest total number of points wins. If this were a real Divisional or State STEM Competition, awards would be given to teams that design the most innovative working models.

This downloads a PDF version of the 2012 Engineering Design Challenge Team Instructions.

Click here to download the 2012 Engineering Design Challenge Judges' Instructions to go with this challenge.

Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills (TEKS) for this Adventure
6th Grade Science

Students can design and implement experimental investigations by making observations, asking well-defined questions, formulating testable hypotheses, and using appropriate equipment and technology

Analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student

Students can identify advantages and limitations of the crane models such as size, scale, properties, and materials

Compare and contrast potential and kinetic energy

Identify and describe the changes in position, direction, and speed of an object when acted upon by unbalanced forces

Measure and graph changes in motion

Students can investigate how inclined planes and pulleys can be used to change the amount of force to move an object.

6th Grade Math

Students can record measurements on all aspects of the crane

Plotting data to be able to set up graphs and calculate mean, median and mode and range of information

Geometry and spatial reasoning

Apply mathematics to everyday life, society, and the workplace

Model and analyze situations and solve problems

7th Grade Science

Students can design and implement experimental investigations by making observations, asking well-defined questions, formulating testable hypotheses, and using appropriate equipment and technology

Analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student

Students can identify advantages and limitations of the crane models such as size, scale, properties, and materials

Students can contrast situations where work is done with different amounts of force to situations where no work is done such as moving a box with a crane and without a crane, or standing still

7th Grade Math

Study the proportionality of the different sizes of cranes and how that can affect the design and range of weight the crane can pick up

Solve mathematical and real-world problems involving different and similar shapes, and scale drawings

8th Grade Science

Students can design and implement experimental investigations by making observations, asking well-defined questions, formulating testable hypotheses, and using appropriate equipment and technology

Analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student

Students can identify advantages and limitations of the crane models such as size, scale, properties, and materials

Demonstrate and calculate how unbalanced forces change the speed or direction of an object's motion

Students can investigate and describe applications of Newton's law of inertia, law of force and acceleration, and law of action-reaction such as in vehicle restraints, sports activities, amusement park rides, Earth's tectonic activities, and rocket launches.

8th Grade Math

Scatterplots and analyzing data to address questions of association such as linear, non-linear, and no association between bivariate data

Study the proportionality of the different sizes of cranes and how that can affect the design and range of weight the crane can pick up

Order a set of real numbers arising from mathematical and real-world contexts

High School TEKS Tie-Ins:

Students can understand energy and its forms, including kinetic and potential energies

Students can understand the law of conservation of energy and the processes of heat transfer

Identifying 3-dimensional figures with its 2-dimensional cross-sections when constructing and designing the crane and its parts

Applying the Pythagorean theorem with finding out certain measurements of right triangles

Determine the lengths of sides and measures of angles in a right triangle by applying the trigonometric ratios sine, cosine, and tangent to solve problems

Apply the formula for the area of regular polygons to solve problems using appropriate units of measure

Physics/Integrated Physics and Chemistry

Students can investigate how an object's motion changes only when a net force is applied, such as lifting objects with their crane

Recognize and demonstrate that objects and substances in motion have kinetic energy

Demonstrate common forms of potential energy, including gravitational

Demonstrate that moving electric charges produce magnetic forces and moving magnets produce electric forces; (if magnets are used)

Students can investigate the law of conservation of energy

Calculate the effect of forces on objects, including the law of inertia, the relationship between force and acceleration, and the nature of force pairs between objects

Develop and interpret free-body force diagrams

Students can identify and describe motion relative to different frames of reference

Principles of Technology

Students can describe the nature and identify everyday examples of magnetic forces and fields when picking up objects with a magnet attached to their crane (if using magnets)

Students can describe the transformational process between work, potential energy, and kinetic energy (work-energy theorem) and use their crane as an example to analyze and calculate the relationships among work, kinetic energy, and potential energy

Bonus:

Attach a magnet to end of crane and pick up objects with it (Physics) and measure how much weight the crane can pick up.

Share this absolutely stunning video from 2012: Liebherr Crane pulls off a truly amazing feat of engineering with some of the world's biggest cranes. Discuss what your students would need to calculate if their boss one day asked them to pull off an event like this.

Looking for more?

These ideas come from our curated idea boards on Pinterest. If you liked these, you'll love our Engineering: Activities for All Ages board!

With over 4,000 pins organized into 47 different boards, TAME's Pinterest presence is specially curated to help teachers, parents, and students of all ages get excited about STEM.

By Lindsey Carmichael, October 19, 2015.

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TAME Engineering Adventure: Crane Challenge

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Welcome to TAME Engineering Adventures! Every month we strive to bring you two engineering activities (this month we will provide one warm-up activity and one practice competition activity) that will help you challenge your students with hands-on learning. This October's Engineering Adventure is to construct a crane! We provide a terrific video fro...

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Curiosity machine

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Curiosity Machine - Hands-on Science Projects

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Free hands-on science and engineering projects for families and educators. Build 80+ projects with everyday household materials.

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International children's library

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ICDL - International Children’s Digital Library

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AR game making

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TaleBlazer games played on your smart phone take learning anywhereMake AR games easily, using the drag and drop TaleBlazer editorStep back in time at Old Sturbridge Village and learn about economics of daily life in New England. Learn more about their TaleBlazer game Dollars & Sense Our collaborative research project, iCSI, is funded by NSF and investigates how augmented reality games can support informal science learning in local communities

Learn More Learn More Learn More Learn More

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TaleBlazer games played on your smart phone take learning anywhereMake AR games easily, using the drag and drop TaleBlazer editorStep back in time at Old Sturbridge Village and learn about economics of daily life in New England.

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Grok Learning

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We support teachers both in and out of the classroom. Request free teacher access for your professional development, and bring our state-of-the-art learning platform into your classroom.

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The Keys To Chromakey

Green Screens and blue screens were the keys to chromakey in the 1970s, the use of blue or green screens as backgrounds for use with chromakey became widespread amongst local TV news programs, conjuring up images of cheesy weathermen in garish plaid polyester jackets standing in front of superimposed maps. The goal of that new technology was to shoot the weatherman in the studio against a blue or green screen, then delete the background color and insert various images, from maps to pictures. But very often, the key would be imprecise, causing said weatherman in his garish plaid polyester jacket to appear to be dematerializing into his map, usually somewhere around the Great Lakes or Sheboygan.

But that was long ago. These days, chromakey and related technologies, such as blue and green screen effects, have gotten so exact, they're the key to Hollywood blockbusters ranging from the recent trilogy of Star Wars prequels to such quasi-comic book films as Sky Captain, Sin City and 300. One reason these effects have taken off in the past few years is that compositing via PC has become incredibly sophisticated. And that technology has recently trickled down rapidly to the consumer level.

While Hollywood films still have multi-million-dollar budgets, they have saved considerable sums with green-screen effects, as sets are built in a computer, not by draftsmen and riggers. Similarly, because compositing via PC is now inexpensive enough that the average serious hobbyist can afford it, green-screen effects allow one-man video podcasts to have an extremely slick look, even if they're shot in a garage or a basement. So let's look at some of the elements involved in producing a successful key.

Blue or Green Screen?

In the past, the main color for chromakeying was blue. Beginning in the late 1970s, there was a slow industry flip-over to green-colored screens for chroma. That's because of the detail in the green color channel that digital cameras retain. Additionally, green screens typically require less light to properly illuminate. However, both of these colors share a similar trait: unless you're videotaping an Andorian or an Orion, flesh tones don't contain blue or green. So you can remove the screen color without causing the talent's face to dematerialize.

However, clothes can certainly contain either color. Nowhere was the disparity between costuming and chromakeying more of a significant factor than in the first Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. For obvious reasons, Superman's very blue suit required that special effects technicians film Reeve in front of one of the first green screen backdrops, rather than the then-common blue screen.

Be sure to advise your on-air talent to dress appropriately, to ensure that his or her clothing doesn't interfere with the key. This phenomenon is one reason that companies such as Photoflex (www.photoflex.com) make portable backdrops with both green and blue sides, so that the videographer can quickly swap out the color when necessary.

Choke Your Matte - Not Your Talent!

Many of today's editing programs now have chroma effects built into them. Whichever program you use for green screen, you'll find that the process will be much smoother when you plan ahead. This will help you avoid errors while videotaping the talent and hours sitting in front of the compositing program.

If you'll pardon the pun, there are two primary keys to successful chroma. The first is to make sure to light the background as evenly as possible, with no hot spots. Many programs use a tool with an eyedropper icon (similar to those in digital photography programs such as Photoshop) to select the shade of green or blue in the backdrop and key it out. This is time-consuming, so keeping the color as uniformly lit as possible on the set makes the post-production work much easier.

Second, it helps to stand the subject as far away from the backdrop as possible to separate the two. This helps to reduce spill from the lights illuminating the talent into the lighting on the green screen. It helps to blur the backdrop, which keeps wrinkling and other blemishes from affecting the key.

Once you have shot the footage in front of the green screen, it's time to composite it, via your editing program. How tight the compositing looks will depend on the quality and design of the program you use. For example, while Adobe After Effects has a somewhat more cumbersome graphical user interface than Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects has a matte choker function that can dramatically tame matte bleed. This helps to reduce or eliminate that green-screen halo effect that causes viewers so many flashbacks to those 1970s-era weathermen. And like most compositing programs, they both allow for the creation of large blocky "garbage masks" to block out background objects (such as lighting rigs) in a quick-and-dirty fashion before beginning the fine tuning.

Additionally, both programs (and many others) can create a shadow effect between the talent and whatever background you insert. Ironically, it's probably a more exaggerated shadow than you'd want were the talent properly lit and standing on a real set. But it can go far in providing that suspension of disbelief that causes the viewer to accept that a chroma shot is working.

Replace the Green Screen with a Convincing Digital Background

In the past, a television production required a dedicated studio and lots of expensive, cumbersome overhead lighting to make the scene appear evenly lit. These days, with a couple of grand for a lighting kit and a digital backing, it's possible to "build" a virtual set that looks like it costs a lot more than it actually does. Digital Juice (www.digitaljuice.com) is one of several companies that sell slick-looking video backing tracks which you can loop to form a digital background, so you can green-screen the talent in front of it. Combining these clips with a DV camera, a tripod, lights and compositing software makes it possible to turn virtually any garage or basement into a video studio.

What's the future for do-it-yourself green screening? Serious Magic (www.seriousmagic.com), which became a division of Adobe recently, points the way towards one scenario. Its Ultra 2 program (now available bundled as part of Adobe's new Creative Suite 3 Production Premium kit) combines a fairly big collection of incredibly slick-looking virtual sets along with their compositing program.

The end result is that you can position the talent in front of a small green screen, record via a standard Mini DV camcorder on a stationary tripod and proceed to composite in all sorts of virtual sets, along with some amazingly slick camera moves created inside the compositing program. These include helicopter shots zooming into science fiction backgrounds that Gene Roddenberry would have given his eyeteeth for during the heyday of Star Trek. What was science fiction a few decades ago is now science reality.

Of course, these virtual sets aren't for everyone: they may be too overwhelming or "arch" for a production that will ultimately end up as a five-minute clip on YouTube. A less complex backing may be more appropriate for some productions; obviously, experimentation is the key.

Chromakey Green Screens Can Make for a Slick "Vent"

As a case study in how green screen and chroma can make a small operation look network-slick, it's worth studying the production techniques employed by Bryan Preston. He's the producer of the five- to ten-minute daily video clips for Hot Air's (www.hotair.com) daily Vent vidcasts. Preston extensively uses chroma to generate digital backdrops behind the on-air talent, such as Fox News panelist Michelle Malkin. Preston recently told me, "We don't have a studio per se, so we're using a Lowel Tota-Light kit. Basically, the way I set things up is that I light my talent with four lights. I point two Rifas - a large Rifa and a smaller Rifa - at the talent. And then I have two Lowel Pros, little 500-watters, as my rim lights. I light the green screen itself with two umbrella lights, Lowel V-Lights."

Preston says that the nature of green screen requires lighting it separately from the talent. "The trick, of course, with any green screen, is to get enough light on the green screen so that the green hits the right tones" for keying, he adds. "But you also don't want to get so much that it bounces onto the talent. So I've played with distances to get Michelle far enough away from the screen, but close enough to it, because the green screen itself is a five-by-eight foot portable green screen." To cut down on spill, Preston eventually ended up placing his talent about six feet from his Botero collapsible fabric green screen.

This article only scratches the surface of what chromakey and green screen can do. You might not create the next Sin City or Star Wars, but to elevate the quality of your next YouTube clip, green screen can go far towards creating champagne-quality video on a Budweiser budget.
Ed Driscoll is a freelance journalist covering home theater and the media.

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The Keys To Chromakey: How To Use A Green Screen

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Green Screens and blue screens were the keys to chromakey in the 1970s, the use of blue or green screens as backgrounds for use with chromakey became widespread amongst local TV news programs, conjuring up images of cheesy weathermen in garish plaid polyester jackets standing in front of superimposed maps.

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2016-2026 STEM Strateg

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OPEN IN NEW WINDOW

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Support for the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies with lesson plans, case studies, advice for school leaders, activities for students and for families. See links to the digital technologies industry events and programs. Get support with the development of computational thinking and coding skills in Australian students.

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