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.
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The Preps have been tasked with finding the best kind of shopping bag. They were presented with four bags: 1. A thin disposable plastic bag (the kind you buy at the supermarket if you forgot to bing you other ones) 2. A thicker, reusable plastic bag (the kind that folds up neatly in the little bag for storage) 3. A hessian/canvas bag 4. A paper bag (similar to a gift bag) They decided that a good shopping bag needs to be strong, tough and big. Miss Augello suggested that cost and eco-friendliness was also important considerations. Over the next few weeks, the Prep students will be conducting their own tests and observations to give each bag a score for each category. The bag with the most points at the end will be deemed the Best Shopping Bag. Now that the Preps have gotten used to the routine in the Discovery Room and have had a short explainer about what each of the four fields of STEM actually are, they are ready to join the rest of the school in investigating our concept for the term - Caring for Populations. They are learning about how we look after human, plant and animal populations. They will be mostly focusing on plants. They will learn about how they grow and change, what they need for survival and how humans use them as food, building materials and to make clothes. Of course, to do that they need some actual plants to study, so this week, they planted some radish seed for us to track over the remainder of term. 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. The Preps learnt about clouds this week. They learnt that they are made from water and talked about why they look different every day. They made different types of clouds out of cotton wool.Prep had fun this week thinking about coloured light. They used coloured lenses to see how things look different. We enjoyed looking pretty silly!
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! |
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February 2022
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