Description

This educational kit includes a series of visually-appealing toys and comprehensive educational aids developed for teaching and learning in high-tech hydraulic engineering, advanced water-supply and sanitary pipework engineering, fluid mechanics and process engineering, applied physics and energy sciences – as well as for plain construction fun, modelling enjoyment and challenges. It consists of some imitations of pipeline systems, including different sizes and lengths of pipes and pipe entries, different contraction and expansion of joints, flow meters, piezometers and digital counters.

This toy series was developed for potential university internal teaching applications as well as possible external market commercialization.

Intended educational value 

There are a few categories of components that may be presented in different sets for different levels of complexity and different intended purposes (e.g. for fun play, modelling, school projects, and/or university, vocational and professional education and training). The targeted users range in age from eight to 88, and may be categorized into the following three specific interest groups with respective intended purposes:

1. Younger age groups: This set of toys has components designed to be quick and easy to fit for convenient construction, which can train youngsters' manual dexterity and help to develop their imagination.
2. Older age groups: This set of toys has mutually compatible components that allow unlimited expansion into systems according to the recommendations suggested by the user manual or users' imaginative creations.
3. Primary, secondary and university students: This set of toys also has fully illustrated user manuals and well-designed experiment worksheets, and is a suitable and very helpful teaching aid and experiment kit. It can promote the understanding of concepts in fluid mechanics with the universal fluid mechanics educational kit and workshops, as well as assess the understanding of students with the teaching materials through their creation of fluid mechanics models.

Example of application

1. Junior, novice and intermediate levels (with more than 60 simple to extremely complex and challenging models possible), which include:
   • exciting water play with closed conduit networks without wetting and flooding the home;
   • designing and building a simulated water-supply system for a city-horizontal piping network;
   • designing and building a simulated water-supply system for a commercial or residential building-vertical piping network; and 
   • an anti-riot hydro-cannon.
      
2. School projects (with more than 100 exciting projects possible), which include:
   • carrying out hydrostatic pressure experiments with single and multiple immiscible fluids;
   • U-tube experiments; 
   • hydrodynamic flow experiments with pumps, control valves and flow-rate measurement devices; and 
   • flow velocity versus flow rate.
      
3. University education and vocational training levels (with more than 300 topical experiments and advanced projects in hydrostatics engineering, hydrodynamics engineering, dimensional analysis and energy sciences possible), which include:
   • verifying the "continuity equation" with crazy complex piping networks;
   • experimenting with the conservation of mass - material balance theories - "Prove it wrong if you dare!" 
   • verifying the "Bernoulli energy equation" with a hydraulic dam and hydro-power plant model simulator - "Advanced technology in green energy and renewable energy"; and
   • experimenting with the conservation of energy - with pump, dynamo, friction losses - "Prove it wrong if you dare!"
      

Evaluation/Comments

The deliverables should prove very useful for active learning in fluid mechanics theory and practice. Through the model-making process of the prototype, this interactive conceptual learning approach will help students to organize their thinking, picture the sequence of events in fluid mechanics theory and understand fundamental concepts, instead of just memorizing all the materials for examinations.

Through creating their own fluid mechanics educational kits, students are provided with an encouraging environment for exchanging ideas, comparing designs and gaining access to more detailed information about fluid mechanics. The most important outcome is that students can develop deep understanding of the most basic concepts in fluid mechanics instead of just memorizing the formulae and theories for assessment. In comparison with the fixed experimental set-up in a laboratory, with student creativity this flexible universal component kit can result in something new every time.
 

Remarks

"Fluid Mechanics Educational Kit" mentioned in this project can be further developed into an educational toy series "Young Hydraulic Engineer". This toy series can be used as potential university internal teaching applications as well as possible external market commercialization. Further information can be found in the full project report and PowerPoint as the attachments.