SciGirls
Pedal Power - Full Episode
Season 2 Episode 8 | 28m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
SciGirls engineer a bike powered ice-cream maker.
Best friends Angela, Olivia, Margaret and Rebecca don welding masks and rev up power tools to engineer an ice cream-maker that’s powered by their bikes.
SciGirls
Pedal Power - Full Episode
Season 2 Episode 8 | 28m 25sVideo has Closed Captions
Best friends Angela, Olivia, Margaret and Rebecca don welding masks and rev up power tools to engineer an ice cream-maker that’s powered by their bikes.
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Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(SciGirls) We love biking, and we love ice cream.
Eco-friendly ice-cream maker powered by your feet!
We decided that if we custom-built one, it'll be more efficient and better-suited to our experiment.
That is not ice cream.
Oh my gosh!
It's the future of ice-cream technology!
(Izzie) Major funding for "SciGirls" is provided by the National Science Foundation-- supporting education and research across all fields of science and engineering.
The National Science Foundation-- where discoveries begin!
(woman) Additional funding provided by L'Oreal USA.
For girls in science... you can learn more at ForGirlsInScience.org And by PPG Industries Foundation-- committed to bringing positive impact to our communities.
(girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) We need you (girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) Come on!
When I need help, and I've got a question there's a place I go for inspiration Gotta get to the Web, check the girls' investigation What girls?
(Izzie) SciGirls!
Whoo!
(girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) I need you!
(girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) Come on!
You've gotta log on, post, upload, pitch in!
Yeah!
Wanna get inside a world that's fascinating?
The time is right 'cause SciGirls are waiting, (girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) We need you!
(girls) S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S (Izzie) SciGirls!!
Hey there biker dude, whatcha doin'?
Trying to figure out what my legacy should be when I graduate.
Jockalicious future winner of the Tour de France?
Grungealicious future rock star?
[honk!]
Or creepalicious future Bobo the clown.
Wait!
[shutter click] Ah, what was that for?
I have to take a picture and post it on my page-- before I told you the clown is out.
No clowns, ever!
Gotcha.
But still, which one.
Na-na na-na wow-wow!
Musician or... [breathes heavily] cyclist?
Hm... why not both?
Ooh, I like the way you think.
Oh maybe the SciGirls will have a little advice.
SciGirls!
Okay, what do we got?
Just no clowns, hm, that's all I ask, no clowns.
Oh hey, this looks like it's got Jake's name written all over it.
Watch for the arrows!
They're clues for the "Pick'M, Stick'M" game on the website.
What's your favorite place to bike?
My name is Margaret, and I live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Maybe by the Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis.
I love that, and my friends, not only do we like to bike, but we really like to design and invent things.
My name is Olivia.
We make a lot of things, usually just out of things we found in the basement or the garage.
My name is Rebecca.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are some of the most bike-friendly cities in the country.
Let's take one with a good close-up of the falls.
And then we should take a picture of us too.
Yeah.
My name is Angela.
Today we went on a bike ride and we ate ice cream and we had a lot of fun.
Would you mind taking a picture of us together?
Yeah.
(man) 2, 3, cheese!
(SciGirls) Cheese!
Alright, so you guys, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
I like cherry.
Cookie dough.
Double fudge brownie.
What if instead of lugging around ice cream in a cooler on your backpack while you biked, there was a way to kind of make it while you biked?
(Olivia) 'Cause we love biking and we love ice cream and we thought it would be great if after biking we could have the reward of ice cream at the end.
(all) Mill City Farmer's Market?
I have no idea.
You guys, it opens next Saturday.
Really?
We can actually try making something.
And then we could give it to people at the farmer's market!
If we got this to work, it wouldn't need batteries or electricity.
An eco-friendly ice-cream maker that's powered by your feet.
That'd be so great.
I have a lot of experience with bikes, and I have a lot of experience with ice cream, so I thought that it wouldn't be too hard to have the two together.
1, 2, 3.
These are always fails.
My parents and my family, we bike a lot, and whenever we have a flat tire or a bike that needs fixed, we'll take it to The Hub.
Hey, I'm Margaret, nice to meet you Amber.
I'm Angela.
Amber is a bike mechanic who helped us with our research today.
I'll give you some tips on...
Thank you so much.
That's great, okay.
(Margaret) The key parts of the bike are, you have 2 wheels, unless, of course, you're using training wheels, in which case you would have 4.
A frame, the handlebars.
Probably the most important part is to learn about the drivetrain, it's like the motor of the bike.
(Margaret) There's the crank set and there's the crank arms, which attach to the pedals.
(Rebecca) Gears, see the freewheel, brakes-- very important, Chain ring, a comfortable seat, the front derailer and the back derailer, which helps you shift gears.
If I missed something, then I'm not surprised.
If we, like are going to attach something to this that's going to be like making something like churning, what gear would it be good to be in?
Like would you want to be in a high gear or a low gear?
It's good to pick a gear that you think you'd be able to sustain for a long time and that's not too easy and not too hard.
(Rebecca) After we left the bike shop, Amber brought out this really awesome machine for us to look at.
(SciGirls) Cool!
Look at this!
(Angela) When the ice-cream trike came out, I was super like, amazed, 'cause it wasn't at all what I was expecting.
It was such a good thing for me to see; just how big that barrel was!
Basically how this thing works is the pulley is here, it's attached to this groove here by the wheel, the wheel turns, the pulley comes up, and makes this whole system here turn, and then in turn, that makes this whole area here, makes the ice-cream maker turn around.
See, it's attached here, and that churns the ice cream.
Pretty surprised by the setup; I hadn't thought about attaching it to the wheel.
(Rebecca) I really like how the mechanical energy of just like, the turning on the bike got translated into the churning of the ice cream.
(Angela) Becca, how does it feel?
(Rebecca) It's pretty cool.
(Angela) How's changing the gears?
(Rebecca) I've never changed a gear in my life.
(Margaret) The fact that you couldn't really steer it first was a big problem.
It was pretty slow; I mean, we even rode in the pedestrian lane, and it got faster, but still, it wasn't really fast.
Kind of, it isn't like normal bike so it's perfectly balanced, but once you find kind of the equal, which is leaning more towards the left, it works really well.
Wait, wait, wait, let me... stuck.
It's like, stuck.
It's jammed.
Oh yeah, that's what happened.
(Margaret) The rubber tube they used to churn the ice cream, that kept getting caught in the wheel.
If we use one of these on our bike, we want to make sure that doesn't happen.
Exactly.
The ice cream trike was kind of like steering a horse.
Whoops!
Sorry.
Where am I going?
Angela!
Where am I going?
Start on the path, then you go round and round in circles, because it always wanted to lean to the right.
It does pull to the right a little bit, so that's why; it's not you.
Try not to run over any small dogs either.
(Amber) We got this Angela.
(Olivia) She hasn't run into anything yet!
[SciGirls laugh; Angela screams] Well, gotta stop!
That's the thing, it's like, awkward.
Maybe building a bigger ice-cream machine isn't the best idea.
Like, maybe having an ice-cream machine that's easier to balance on 2 wheels is better.
Yeah.
Obviously we're doing 2 wheels.
So let's begin.
We brainstormed a little bit to see what exactly we wanted our setup to be.
Would it be possible to put the derailer up here?
Really, yeah.
So then it'd be like, kind of like a bike in reverse.
I don't think we're going to use the ice-cream maker that we saw on the ice-cream bike, 'cause it's huge.
I think we're going to try for a little more modern-looking one and obviously, it'll have to be a fair bit smaller since it's going to be on a 2-wheeled bike and we won't have that big platform.
Hi, I'm Angela!
And one thing I really enjoy doing is running.
One particular outdoor place I really like is actually my backyard.
There's our windmill; roses all through here.
I love taking pictures with my camera.
Good-bye.
Can't wait you guys, this is so awesome.
(Olivia) We're going to take the blueprints we drew up yesterday and we're going to show them to Yvonne, who is a mechanical engineer here at St. Kate's.
I'm Olivia.
Olivia.
(Olivia) She's going to be sort of the turning point to really help us make this less of like a dream, more of a reality.
Yvonne brought us a hand-powered ice-cream maker, and she showed us how it worked.
Okay, so lift that up, you should lift that up, have a sense of how heavy that is.
Oh that's really light.
That's without ice.
And without ingredients.
If you mount this on the back of your bicycle, is it going to be like this?
Um-hm.
Or is it going to be like that.
Or we could turn it like that.
Some of your ideas, it's great to have some brainstorming things.
Can you show it to me?
This one of the sketches we came up with.
If you have the ice-cream maker on the rack on the back of the bike, and the crank set is here with the pedals, and we're going to attach a pulley to the crank set, and then to the ice-cream maker, so that when you pedal, the pulley will turn, and it will churn the ice cream.
We can come up with fancy bicycle-power systems and so forth, but if it doesn't make the ice cream, that's sort of your key thing, you really want it to make ice cream.
That's true.
Right.
So are you going to use an existing ice-cream maker, are you going to make your own?
I think we're going to make our own.
You're going to make your own?
Yeah.
Oh, I don't know.
I thought we were using...
I though we were using an existing one, I hope we are.
My friends and I, we ran across a little bump in the road, a little disagreement.
We have like, 3-1/2 days to attach this to the bike.
If we have the gears all figured out on the bike, but then somehow the ice-cream maker, it's too heavy or it won't work, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of what we've been doing.
This is ridiculous, you know Margaret, we're not going to make some huge metal thing.
We wanted to make ice cream, and we're already meddling a lot with how to get the bike's power into the ice-cream maker.
We're just really trying to like, take in all the facts.
We're trying to collaborate and see what is best.
Can I oppose that idea a little bit?
I think it is more work making one from scratch.
At this point, we don't exactly know how an ice-cream maker that is already made will work on the back of the bike.
You never argue with someone, it's always what their idea is.
It's not a direct hit to you, it's a direct hit to your idea.
If we did make one from scratch, we would have the liberty to change things that we wouldn't with a premade ice-cream maker.
This is the biggest thing--you can't say which one is going to work and which isn't going to work-- that's the engineering part of it.
If we knew what it was going to do, why would we do it?
It'd be a kit, right?
(Olivia) So far our plan is to begin with breaking off into 2 groups.
One group is going to make 2 different kinds of ice cream, and we're going to see which one works better and what our results are.
That one gear that would maintain the basic functioning of a bicycle, the moving part.
And the other group is going to work on connection, connecting the actual like, handheld pump with the bike.
I think we've kind of ditched the idea of using an already existing ice-cream maker, 'cause we decided that if we kind of custom-built one, it'll be more efficient and better-suited to our experiment.
My name is Margaret, and I like to do circus!
This is my buddy, Bob.
Ta-dah!
This is my sister Izzie and her bearded dragon Willie.
This is my cat Bebe.
See ya!
This is so exciting.
I know, it's going to be really cool.
So we have to make 2 types of ice cream today.
Team Cream was sort of in charge of making the ice cream and testing out which recipe and which container.
If we use this.
This is nice and light.
Yeah, but if we use it, we should probably put it in this.
Team Connection was in charge of finding out how we're going to get the ice-cream machine attached to the bike.
So right now we're working on prototyping or modeling.
We had 2 ideas, and one of them was the direct connection.
There's a wheel and there's the ice-cream turner.
So when the wheel turns, the ice-cream maker will turn as well.
Ready?
Yup.
I can't hold up this thing, wait, get off for a second.
How are we going to keep it up without me holding it?
Because I'm really just preventing what it's supposed to do.
Our recipe was half-and-half, heavy whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla extract.
We should probably-- ice layer, then a salt layer, then an ice layer, now a layer of salt.
I think that the way we would attach this to the direct connection, it would come out here, coming from the rotational axis of the bucket, we would need to attach it to here.
And it would still have direct contact with the wheel, but there wouldn't be anything on the surface of the bucket.
We're going to fit that thing in the bucket and start to make the ice cream.
10 minutes, starting now.
Hold the bucket, Margaret.
Don't drill my hands please.
Hold it in one spot.
4 minutes and 2 seconds.
(both) Yea!
I think if we're going to put it on the bike, we should probably do something more like big here and big here, and small and small, 'cause it's not going to roll in a straight line.
♪ ♪ Let's just try this.
Make it count!
Oh, it's going.
Wow!
It's a haywire bucket!
Yea, yea, we're done!
Great, 10:15.
Your idea works, if only we just like had it connected and we had an even bucket, it would spin.
Ooh, nice!
We rolled it, we rolled it just enough.
Oh this is perfect.
Like real ice cream Yvonne!
Hey Yvonne!
Hi Yvonne!
Hi, great.
We're making some ice cream, we'll have you try it and sample it.
We already sampled it, it's pretty good, but let's make sure it's not liquid.
How much have you sampled it really?
Not too much, we ate a whole batch first, but not this much.
Here you go, I hope you like chocolate, 'cause we added chocolate to this one.
Look at that!
Nice consistency.
Yeah, it turned out really good.
Yeah, okay.
Is it poisonous?
Mm, it's creamy, I like that.
Okay.
I'm feeling pretty good about this.
But Jake, how are you going to play the guitar and ride a bike at the same.... Oh ye of little faith-- watch and learn.
I'm a rock 'n' roll rider Rock 'n roll rider, yeah, oh yeah.
Wow, it's uh, kinda working.
Oh, oh watch out for that dog!
[loud clatter] Woof!
I watched and I learned-- that riding without being able to use your arms is not the best idea.
Yeah, I don't want to be remembered for that.
[slurp!]
Except by him, hey little guy, can I call you Crash?
[slurp!]
I'm gonna call the SciGirls.
Hi guys.
Hi.
Hey, Yvonne.
Working with Yvonne, a real engineer, I feel like she's making really great points that we can think about and we can just kind of like solve on our own.
You want to make sure that this container with the cream mixture, is completely surrounded by ice.
Or like mostly surrounded.
Mostly surrounded by ice.
Yeah, you guys think it'd be possible to put a cap on this?
Yvonne helped us think about how exactly we should attach the ice-cream maker to the bike.
Team Connection, your original idea was to come off of the axle, off of here, which is definitely one way to do it.
We also have this other part of the structure we might be able to come off of, may be able to make a frame off of that.
(SciGirl) That makes sense.
We really liked Yvonne's idea of attaching the ice-cream maker to the seat stem of the bike, so we decided that the best way to do this would be to weld metal brackets.
We got off the paper and into kind of a 3-dimensional reality.
We took out some cardboard, then we cut it into strips, we Duct-Taped it together, then we slid it onto the bike pole.
Yeah, that's about right.
We wanted to use these for kind of measurement purposes and to show the welders what our ideas really were.
Okay, thank you so much.
Hi, I like cooking and baking.
Mmm, and I made dinner tonight.
Hello puppy!
I like biking to the gym and exercise, see ya!
We're going to the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center to work with Heather Doyle, a metalsmith.
You must be Heather.
I am.
This is so cool!
I know!
We put on our welding jackets and went right to work.
(Heather) Cool, show me your design.
So our idea was, place the bucket about here and like, a metal rod going out this way, straight here, straight there, a rectangle without the last side.
A main concern of ours yesterday was is the bucket really going to swivel while you're riding it.
And there's a hinge right about here that allows us to open and shut the bucket.
(Heather) You have some sections of weldable hinge, it's piano hinge, it doesn't have any coatings or anything on it, so it would be perfect for that.
(Rebecca) The purpose of the hinge was if you can't open the ice-cream bucket, there's really no point in making the ice cream, if it's just going to sit there and melt in the bucket.
So let's measure this properly now.
Fabrication is when you're connecting all the pieces of the contraption together.
Okay.
It's when you're finally putting your prototype into real life.
You're cutting out and measuring all the pieces that you need for this and just bringing it all together.
(Heather) Can you feel it cut?
(SciGirls) Yeah.
Cool.
Sweet, cool.
So now that we have the pieces cut, we're going to go weld.
This process creates a lot of sparks, so we want to make sure that you're protected head to toe.
We had to wear these beanies to cover our hair.
[laughing] Do you want to know what this looks like?
We all looked ridiculous.
I think Margaret definitely looked the funniest, like in a good way though.
I think it's fair to say that this is probably not our best look.
I thought I looked a little like a marshmallow.
Like, what chemicals go into like, making the flame?
(Heather) It's oxygen and acetylene, so acetylene is the fuel, and oxygen is the accelerant.
6000 degrees right at that little cone in the center.
(Margaret) Wow, it's such a cool color.
(Heather) It is; it's beautiful.
(Olivia) It's really beautiful, like all the different colors, like orange and blue and red and green and stuff, it's really beautiful and relaxing.
(Heather) And we're just going to attach those two ring pieces.
Through moving the torch back and forth between the 2 pieces, we're going to bring both pieces up to an equal heat.
You'll be able to tell if one is heating up faster by the color of the metal.
So if one is a bright, bright orange, and the other one is a dull red, we'll just change the angle a little bit so that we can get them both up to heat at the same time.
(Margaret) It looks like they're about the same temperature.
Um, filler is this long kind of metal rod, and what you do is, you stick it in between the 2 parts that you want to weld.
All you do is like, you'd stick it in there, you could just see it melt on the end, it was really cool.
Hot metals!
(Olivia) Quenching is when after you're done welding the metal, it's really, really hot, so you pick it up with these tongs or pliers or whatever, and then you dunk it in a very large bucket of water.
(all) Whoo.
We had, on one side we put a little hinge, we welded that, and then we welded another strip of metal to the hinge.
We welded 2 bolts to either side of the metal strips.
They need to go inside of the little hole in the bucket.
Wow, look how hot that is!
Hold on tight.
In order to mount our invention onto the bike, we need to firmly secure it to the seat.
First we drill the hole through the center of the frame and then we drill the hole through the bike stem.
(Angela) We're having serious technical difficulties; this pipe is a little bit slanted, I mean, it's a little like the line of the edge, the bottom of the circle of the pipe is a little bit off with the bottom of the circle of the hole drilled through the seat.
This screw is going, it's slanting a little bit, so it doesn't quite allow it to go in, but if we just take this screw, we Duct Tape it in-- problem solved.
(Margaret) Problem's definitely solved.
I'm Olivia, and I'm in 9th grade.
I play guitar; I do write some of my own songs.
I play volleyball and I rock-climb.
And I am very tired now, bye.
We've got to line it up, line it up.
Okay.
There you go.
Yes!
Okay, let's push really hard.
When we finally finished welding it and we put it on the bike, I felt really, really good.
Start slow, let's see how it goes.
(Olivia) It's fine when you're just looking at it on paper and stuff, but it was kinda hard to imagine like what it's actually going to look like, and then to see it like a real object.
Like, right out there in the world, it's really a great feeling.
We did it!
Yeah!
(Rebecca) We still weren't sure if this thing could make ice cream, so we got our ingredients together.
"Easy open seal," yeah right!
I was pretty excited and nervous; I was really anxious.
Let's load it in.
I'm going to put this in there.
1, 2, 3.... are you ready?
Let's go.
I think it's locked.
Try the right side.
(Angela) The bucket kept going out to one side.
It's kind of a problem 'cause we need to make ice cream at the farmer's market tomorrow.
Frustrating.
(Angela) See, it worked better when it was rubbing.
We had to bungee the bucket, 'cause it kept going to this side, and it was like a little bit of like ice-cream trike déjà vu.
[clattering] Oh, alright, well let's see.
Oh that is not ice cream.
Not at all.
And that was 3 of us pedaling.
It was nothing but a pile of lovely soup.
I was thinking, as far as purposes of stability, you know how we drilled one hole kind of partially through the, through the seat?
If we drilled another hole all the way through, I think that would add some increased stability.
Our bucket wouldn't veer off to the one side.
(Angela) That's a good idea; we drilled like a hole going through the stem of the bike and the pipe.
Then we stuck a really nice fitting screw all the way through, and were able to put a really tight nut on the end.
So then, now it seems really secure, we tightened the seat all the way too, so that wouldn't be wobbly.
We hope it won't swerve over to the right or to the left.
We hope.
Margaret!
Okay, ready?
Okay.
Go!
Come on you guys, come on.
Oh, it rolled, yes!
It's going!
It's working!
Okay like, pedal really fast, I just want to see how it goes.
You guys, it's not moving at all.
We built it!
Our redesign worked, and the bucket finally stayed in place, but we still hadn't made ice cream, so we're trying it again.
We decided to take the real bike off of the stand outside for a spin.
Oh my gosh!
[all cheer] I seriously forget it's on here.
It's not like, unbalanced at all.
[all cheer] We can hear that chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk.
Exactly, that's what we want to hear!
Better than the ice trike.
Oh, so much better!
[all exclaim happily] It tastes like... satisfaction!
Are you ready Yvonne?
Group hug, group hug.
We did it!
Whoo!
The future of ice-cream technology!
(Angela) We're presenting our invention that we took like, a week to make.
On the bike we had a plaque that said, "M.O.A.R.
Ice-cream Bike."
And that's all of our initials together.
It was between M.O.A.R or O.M.A.R.
(Olivia) We're going to make ice cream for people, and I'm feeling really good about it 'cause it's a beautiful day, and now that we're at the end, I feel like it was one of the best things I've ever done in my whole life.
I'm really excited to show it, feel like it'll be very successful.
I'm just really proud of our team.
(SciGirls) Bike-powered ice cream!
Free samples!
Thank you.
You're welcome.
You girls make this yourself?
(SciGirls) Yes, we did.
(Margaret) It was a really big success, and it wasn't just shared in-between myself and my 3 friends.
Our mentors, they came, and they enjoyed it, so they had a part of that success.
To me, sharing the ice cream and just showing people that eco-friendly things like this are really possible, that was the best part.
Do you want some "M.O.A.R?"
Well, we've got almost all of them.
I want another cup.
Got your clues?
Head on over to the Web and play "Pick'M, Stick'M" at pbskidsgo.org.
So the SciGirls had trouble at first too, then they just kept testing their bike until it was right.
Roger that.
[giggles] Well, lookin' good, lookin' good, lookin'... [clatter] oh, not so good at all!
I'm okay.
[tuba and accordion play march-tempo music] Hey, you did it, and the school bike race is just starting!
Wish me luck.
I won...
I won!
Yeah, I can't believe it.
I can't either, but every time I rode up behind someone, they seemed to get startled and fall.
[laughs] I can't imagine why.
[smack!]
Now that I won, they'll never forget me!
Pretty sure they wouldn't have forgotten you even if you didn't win.
But congrats, Jake-- nice job.
[tuba plays] I think what we should figure out though is the bagging of it.
We decided 2 ways to make ice cream, the first in plastic Baggies.
Well, 10 minutes, start now.
Alright.
Our hands won't be so cold if it's on a bike.
But we'll definitely want several plastic bags, not just one.
We ultimately decided to go with the coffee can or container method, because the plastic Baggie was a fail.
A crime has been committed, and it's up to you to solve it.
The mask for this camp is missing.
Urgent that we need to find it.
You're going to be doing the testing on this evidence.
Careful, careful, careful, we need to preserve the evidence.
It's crunch time and we don't even know if we can find the mask.
SciGirls!
The oysters in the Chesapeake Bay are dying off.
We wanted to go out and see if restored reefs are actually working.
Wow!
We get to build an underwater robot.
Modify it and we test it.
Whoa!
It's a blue crab!
[exclaim happily] (Izzie) Major funding for "SciGirls" is provided by the National Science Foundation-- supporting education and research across all fields of science and engineering.
The National Science Foundation-- where discoveries begin!
(woman) Additional funding provided by L'Oreal USA.
For girls in science... you can learn more at ForGirlsInScience.org And by PPG Industries Foundation-- committed to bringing positive impact to our communities.