September 29

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5th graders are learning about bridges and structural support by testing a variety of index card bridge designs. We discovered that triangles provide the most support and that bridges that use triangle supports are called truss bridges. If your child has an iPad or iPhone, there are lots of bridge building apps. Some of them aren't free but many of them offer at least a few free levels. Just search for "bridge builder" in the App Store.










6th graders voted on the challenge for this week and boat design was the winner. The task was to design a boat that would float for at least 10 seconds with a cargo of at least 25 pennies. They had specific materials to choose from in their design and a budget of $7.00 to "buy" those materials from me. It was tricky to stay within the budget for the initial design and to have enough left over for improvements after initial testing! 

Planning

Building

Testing

 The winning design held over 350 pennies!


Some groups also had time today to investigate adding a paddle to power their boats. They used skewers, rubber bands, duct tape, and cardboard.


Check out the slideshow of all our creations:

September 21

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5th grade students are using our MacBook cart for the first time! It's quite a process getting everyone logged in and into our Google Classroom this first time but we did have some time to design contraptions in Tinker Ball (http://engineering-games.net/logic-games/76/tinker-ball). Students had a list of nine challenges in Google Slides to practice designing with constraints. Not all 5th graders have been to STEM this rotation yet but, if your child has, he or she can login to their Google Classroom (http://classroom.google.com) at home using their Deer Creek Google account and can show you the constraints they used.




6th grade students spent the week researching, designing, testing, and improving containers  for our egg drop challenge. We dropped them from as high as I could reach from the counter today and recorded our results. We had planned to go to the softball fields behind the school for a higher drop from the bleachers, but there was a tournament happening. We're going to try again on Monday to see if our results are the same. Check out the slideshow at the bottom of this post to see a picture and description of each group's device. 










September 13

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5th graders have been practicing their computational thinking by learning how to code their "robot friends".  We learned the vocabulary words algorithm (a set of instructions for performing a task), coding (converting actions to symbols), and debugging (finding and fixing errors in code). Students each had the opportunity to be a programmer and write the algorithms for a cup design and to be a robot to run the code and recreate the design.




6th graders have been busy with several activities. They participated in a digital design challenge using the Tinker Ball game from EngineeringGames.com. In addition to practicing good critical thinking while building "machines" to get the ball to drop into the cup using specific constraints, they used Google Slides and learned how to take screenshots on their laptops. This week they have been busy researching, designing, improving, and testing catapults. It was definitely another test of our determination and perseverance! 










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