Quick update for the week of January 25, 2016

Hi friends!

We have had yet another productive week in the STEM classroom at Wentworth School! My apologies for being out this week on Thursday. I'm sorry to have missed my third grade classes on that day. I missed your final drop copter testing and improvements, but I was here at Wentworth doing some very important work. I worked all day with science and technology teachers across the district to align our essential learning standards, specifically with regard to engineering, to ensure that students are receiving the very best STEM education possible here in Scarborough!

Here's an update for each grade level or this week:

Grade 3

Third graders finished putting the final improvements on their drop copters, finalized their plans, and tested their copters to see which designs would fall the slowest. Our objective was to use the engineering design process to imagine, plan, create, and improve a drop copter that could fall as slowly as possible to take as many aerial photos as possible if a camera were attached to it. The kids discovered that copters with less weight and more surface area on the blades fell the slowest. Nice work grade 3 engineers! Next week we will use the engineering design process to create a new flying technology--a flying disc!

Grade 5

Fifth graders this week had two objectives. The first was to find out how the variables of rocket length, width, and material affected how far the rocket could travel when launched on a stomp launcher. The kids decided to all launch their rockets at a 45 degree angle so that launcher angle was held constant and would not become another variable we needed to consider. The kids did an excellent job launching their rockets---only one rocket landed on the suspended light fixture!! We won't be able to share our results until next week as rocket launching took up most of our class. The students all recorded their distance data and noted which variable they were testing. Next class, we will pool the data from each class and condense it onto one data table that we can analyze to find out which variables yielded the best results for rocket distance. This will become part of the final rocket project criteria depending on which destination in the solar system the students decide to send their rockets. Next week students will begin to plan their rovers and final rocket missions.

The second objective this week was to set-up an account on Project Ignite---a student and teacher portal for using Tinkercad! Tinkercad is a web-based 3D modeling program that the students will use to create a 3D design for a logo to accompany their final rocket and rover mission. If everything works out correctly, we will be able to print these logos in our CubePro 3D printer.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Mrs. A :)