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CREST AWARD

Bronze Level

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Bronze Award

Helping HaitiWhat makes the best refugee tent?

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have you ever wondered …

… could we survive without shelter?

... how long could a person survive living without shelter if their home was destroyed?

… what material makes the 'best' tent?

… why some tents are so much more expensive than others?

you might like to imagine a situation such as …

Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage on Vimeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk21YOdWvgU

Show Helping Haiti Documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHq2gPbO0h0

This refugee tent would be shared between five families

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What makes a good refugee shelter?

In your group...

Write down what things you think a refugee tent needs to have or be like

to be good at its job.

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After having sent out thousands of refugee tents and shelters out to Haiti, Unicef, Oxfam, The Red Cross and other aid organisations have employed your company to research and investigate tent materials in preparation to design a new standard refugee tent to be used in future relief efforts.

You should undertake practical experiments to investigate …

… how well different materials can keep people sheltered

… other properties of the materials you choose, to find out their advantages or disadvantages as shelters

Practical Investigation

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• design a test to investigate the water proofing properties of different materials

• design a test to see how strong different materials are

• Design a way to test some other property of a tent material

You could...

Planning

• Aim: what are we trying to find out in the investigation?

• Prediction: what do you predict the results will be?

• What are the variables:– Independent– Dependent– Control

Variables – things that change

• The independent variable (the thing we changed on purpose)

• The dependent variable (the thing that changed because we changed the independent variable, also the thing we measured)

• The control variables (the things we tried to keep the same to make it a fair test)

Planning

• What equipment will you need?

• Draw and label a diagram showing how you set up the equipment.

• Safety: what are the risks, how can we reduce them?

Results table

Type of plastic bag

Mass needed to break the bag (g)

1 2 3 Mean

Sainsbury's

Tesco

Waitrose