The Grade 5 and 6 students have spent the last few weeks thinking about the forces acting on a falling object and what can be done to mitigate them. Their task was to create some sort of safety capsule to protect their group's tomato from a 4 metre drop onto concrete. They were only allowed to use materials that would otherwise be going into a landfill or mixed recycling bin. There were a variety of designs, some bigger than others. There was a 30x30x30cm size restriction in place and a limit of one parachute if they chose to use one. All students did a fantastic drop with 25 out of 25 tomatoes surviving the fall. A few of the tomatoes did experience some trauma, as evidenced by their slightly split skin but overall a fantastic job! (And the slow-cooked bolognese sauce that Miss Augello made that weekend was just heaven!)
0 Comments
Congratulations to Olivia, Anjali, Austin, Sebby and Lucas for building a phenomenal bridge! Made from icy pole sticks and glue, they constructed a bridge that held an incredible amount of weight. It definitely held 9kg and since they had far exceeded Miss Augello's expectations, she wasn't prepared at all with heavier weights to test their bridge. After some improvising with a 20kg bag of sand from the storeroom, we think the bridge would have held about 15kg since it did start to break slightly when we swapped the 9kg for the 20kg bag.
Some students decide to come to STEM Club on Monday lunchtimes for some engineering challenges. The most recent challenge was to build the tallest tower. Students worked together using as much newspaper as they wanted but they only had a limited amount of masking tape to work with. After learning about the properties of water early in the term, and then comparing fresh water with salty water later in the term, Grade 5/6 were presented with a hypothetical: Imagine you have been in a terrible plane crash and are now stranded on a small tropical island. How could you separate the salt out of the ocean water so that you won't die of thirst before the rescue plane arrives? You may only use items that would be found on your little beach or in the wreckage of the plane. The student quickly worked out that the best way would be to use heat to force the water to evaporate, leaving the salt behind. They showed some excellent problem solving skills and critical thinking to find ways to trap the steam and collect the fresh water as the steam condensed back into liquid water. After our radish experiment outside was snacked upon by caterpillars, Grade 3/4 had a big discussion about the merits of greenhouses. They made models of greenhouses. First they drew a plan to follow and carefully considered what materials they would make their model out of. Some of the materials that greenhouses are made out of in the real world are not appropriate for school so students had to think about alternative materials that would represent the ones used in real life. Once they had completed their plan, they created their model greenhouse. The Preppies have been exploring each of the four disciplines of STEM - Science Technology, Engineering and Maths. To learn about Engineering, the Preps were tasked with making the tallest tower they could using only ten dominoes. As you can imagine, there was lots of falling towers so the Preps practised being resilient and modifying their designs for stability. This week, some classes had a tower building challenge - tallest tower wins! Students showed lots of resilience as towers fell over again and again. We evaluated different designs and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of each. This week, the Preps learnt about the 'E' part of STEM. We talked about what Engineering is all about and then used some dominoes to build some small structures. Our focus was about changing and improving our structures and persevering when they fell over! |
TeacherAlex Augello Archives
February 2022
Categories
All
|