Parents, you should be receiving an email from SignupGenius again for the March STEM Engineering Challenges happening again on Thursday and Friday the 24th and 25th. Your help is invaluable! And speaking of engineering projects, here are the videos from last week's second round of challenges. As was the case for the first round of challenges, groups met with some measure of success but also some spectacular failure. We continue to make the focus on having fun, learning to persevere, and working with a team. The extra lessons are working within a budget and best attempts at reaching the goal. Fifth grade's challenge was... Objective: Design and build a two-section, moveable robotic arm with that can lift an alien object (cup) off the surface (table) of the planet. Mission Brief: Once a rover lands on an alien surface, it must be able to perform science experiments for us remotely. We want this rover to be able to collect samples, take pictures, and monitor the environment. Your portion of the mission today is to design a robotic arm that can reach out and pick up an object and bring it safely back to you. This proved to be much more challenging than they thought as you will see in the video... Fourth graders had the following mission brief given to them: "You have now figured out how to build a rocket to leave the surface of Earth. The next step is to land on the moon. Now NASA needs you to design and test a shock-absorbing system that can help a craft get to the moon and land on the moon and safely deliver two astronauts for exploration without injury to them or their craft." Their craft was a 6-ounce cup and their astronauts were two large marshmallows. You'll notice in this video that our high school helpers also had a chance to try this challenge when they hung out with me during my planning time between 4th and 5th grades... The last group on each day are the third graders. Their task was to "Design & build the framework (6 X 6 X 6 inches) for a new capsule for astronauts that can hold up under the extreme pressure of space (math textbooks.)" We had fun making sure each structure was tested to the fullest (in other words until it was completely destroyed!) Check out the laughs we had with this project...
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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