My trip to MOTAT by Deanna

This is my review of when I went to MOTAT and what I saw, experienced and learned.

I was so excited that MOTAT was giving us a free visit to help us with our project planning. When we got to the entrance of MOTAT we saw the others waiting at the tram station. We wrote on our mind map page MOTAT visit and in the same bubble we wrote ‘look at transport inventions’ and ‘look at how they were invented’. We also wrote in our positives, negatives and world issues. E.g. a positive was ‘Make work for other people’, a negative was ‘It causes pollution’ and a worldwide issue was ‘Petrol is high price’.

My group started at the cars. We had two main questions to answer-‘Why was it invented?’ and ‘how was it invented?’

There was a wheel connected to a handle and when the handle was turned the wheel began to rotate which made another wheel turn.

After the cars we went to the trams. It was the one you could climb into but not for a ride. We sat on the little seat in there and began to write. I wrote ‘It was invented because cars didn’t have enough room for heaps of people. They invented it by making a long car then putting double seats in them.’ On the way back to the main place we went to the buses which were near the trams. I learned that you should always make a model before building the real thing.’ We went into a place that had a big screen and watched a little episode called ‘The transportation of goods’ I learned that food that takes long to get to land is less healthy than food that is growing in your garden. The very last thing we visited was the bicycles. I thought it was weird how the first bike invented had a huge front wheel and a tiny back wheel just for balance. I found out the reason for this is because the pedal was on the front big wheel which meant you have to pedal less than if the wheel was smaller. Once the bicycle chain was invented both wheels could be the same size.  I also found out from Wikipedia the first bike was called a penny farthing because the big wheel was like a British penny and the small wheel was like a small farthing.

Thank you MOTAT for making this trip one of the best.