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Hi, everybody, I'm Nate from Design Squad,
and today we had a question from Opal.
Now Opal asked, "What does an engineer do?"
I'm so glad you asked.
I was hoping somebody would ask this.
I'm an engineer, and what I do as an engineer is
I use science and math to solve real problems.
Now, I think of science as learning how the world works.
As an engineer, it's my job to use that knowledge,
with some math, to solve real problems.
Now, I've got a little problem I've been wanting to solve,
and it involves a cat.
There's the cat, and here's the problem.
Every time my neighbors, who live on the third floor,
go away for vacation, they let me take care of the cat,
which is great-- I like the cat and I like feeding the cat.
The trouble is, every time I feed the cat,
which is two times a day,
I have to walk from the first floor, where my house is,
all the way up to the third level.
Twice a day!
I want to figure out a better way
to get the food from my house
all the way up to the third floor to feed the cat.
Let's go sketch up some ideas
of how we could do it a little better.
Now, off the top of my head, stuff that I can think of
to get cat food all the way up to level three
is, uh, cat food catapult-- yes, pun intended--
a cat food elevator, maybe operated by hand with cables,
a hydraulic cat food lift, powered by the garden hose,
and...
oh, cat food slingshot.
I think the cat food elevator is going to be the most reliable
and easiest to pull off,
so we're going to try that for the first run.
The first thing I'm going to do is sketch out how it could work.
I'm thinking about kind of a clothesline strategy,
but instead of having a cable that's going across
between two buildings laterally, or side to side,
instead I'll take one pulley and move it above
and the other pulley and take it down below
so I can operate it from the ground
and get the cat food up to the top pulley,
where the cat wants to be fed.
Now, onto that string,
I'm going to need to put a bucket to put the cat food into,
and up at the top,
I'm going to need to make sure that the bucket,
when it dumps over the top,
is going to go right into the cat food bowl,
so I probably will need a guide, or maybe a chute.
I think this could work.
Do you have ideas that you think could work?
Send them in to the Design Squad website.
And next time, we're going to build a prototype,
or test version, to see if this can really work.
I can't wait.
Stay tuned.