First update for 2016!

Hi students, teachers, friends, and families,

Happy 2016! I hope everyone had a great winter vacation, found some time to enjoy friends and family, and re-charge their batteries!

Before vacation, the students at Wentworth participated in Hour of Code activities from CODE.org's Code Studio lessons. STEM class was no exception, and the students and I enjoyed creating programs that could run games, play music, and create art with drag and drop coding. The kids learned about algorithms, programs, bugs and de-bugging, sequences and loops. A great time was had by all, and we will continue with Code Studio later on in the trimester. Here's a link to Mrs. Clive's Tech Integration website where you can find a link to Wentworth's Hour of Code activities. Thanks Mrs. Clive for making this coding experience so easy and fun!

https://sites.google.com/a/scarboroughschools.org/wstechintegration/

This first of 2016, the STEM classrooms have been busy with new engineering units!

Grade 5 Update:

The 5th graders started their Aerospace engineering unit by learning about rockets, rovers, and the International Space Station. Then, the 5th graders created their paper rockets that we will launch next week using a stomp launcher. Our objective is to investigate how the variable of weight with affect the distance a rocket can travel. This will help out later on when the students plan a rocket mission to a destination in our solar system that can carry a rover that they have designed to a certain criteria. They must also design their rocket to carry this rover, so it is important to know how the weight of the rover will affect the rocket.

The kids were also excited that you can sometimes spot the International Space Station in the night sky as it is orbiting the earth. Here's a link to try this out with your family!

http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/


Grade 3 Update:

The 3rd graders are getting ready for their upcoming Aeronautical engineering unit, by learning more about technology and how engineers define technologies. The students were technology detectives this week. First we learned that technologies are objects or processes that are engineered by humans to fulfill a need and/or help solve a problem. The kids were very surprised that not all technologies have to be electronic! Then, they had to pick an object that Mrs. Athearn provided and identify if it was in fact a technology or not. Lastly, the students imagined ways to improve their technologies. I was very impressed with the improvements the students came up with. One student thought that a dry erase board eraser could be improved by adding a robotic feature so that it could automatically clean your white board kind of like a Roomba cleans floors. I would love this invention especially for the hard-to-reach places on my white board!

That's all for now!

-Mrs. A