The Great Egg Drop

Monday and Tuesday of this week students worked through the engineering design process with the challenge of keeping an egg from breaking when dropped from a great height.

We discussed ways humans and animals keep eggs from breaking to get us thinking about the task ahead.

Students worked with a partner or small group to plan and build their 'protector'. We tested from the stairwell inside, where we ended up with a lot of broken eggs. We came back together and talked about ideas that worked and those that did not.

Using this new information, groups completed the improve phase, by creating a new egg protector.

When we tested outside, dropping the eggs from the play structure, we had almost 100% success!

Students did really well working together, communicating, and compromising. Nice work!

Egg-cellent

Week 3

This week STEM campers planned, designed and created "bird nests" for eggs to be safely nestled in as they were dropped from the top of the first and second grade playground structure, check in with your child to see if their egg made it!

    

    Hard at work with their plans...

Students also played many cooperative games this week. Here they had to get a frisbee around the circle without using their hands! They used their elbows, back, feet and sometimes their whole body!

Week 2 Animal Games

Week 2 was full of many fun-filled games including these 3 animal games: Save the Chicken, Capture the Chicken and Coconut Island!  While all of these games required a lot of teamwork we did also play many team building games.

Will the House Survive the Wind?

This week students had the challenge of creating a house using spaghetti, sticks, and construction paper. Their house had to withstand the wind from two fans, which simulated the huff and puff from the big, bad wolf.

Miss Melanie started off by reading The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. Then each student did some planning for their house design. They were hard at work building in preparation for testing their structures.

Some students used a tepee design and others used a construction paper base with sticks for support. They all worked so hard and built sturdy houses!

Great job this week!

Building Bridges

We had a great week of recognizing patterns, building bridges and getting to know each other. Whether through the projects that they worked on or the games that they played our students learned a lot from each other, communication and teamwork. It was a fun week for everyone.

Bridge Building

This week students completed an engineering design challenge in which they had to build a bridge to hold weight. We started out by reading The Three Billy Goats Gruff and then we did some research about bridge designs.

Next groups were given their list of materials, which included popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, and small paper cups.  Then, they set to work planning their own design and building.  We tested our bridges and then improved on the designs before we did a retest.

What a magnificent group of bridge engineers!

Day 1

July 14th, 2014

Today camp was all about getting to know one another. Students played team building games which involved many different types of communication between them. This helped to lay the foundations of teamwork which will be important in their STEM challenges later on this week.

In the pictures below, students create a design with pattern blocks and explain to their partner, only using their words, how to replicate it. As the students became more confident, more pattern blocks were added to their set to make the activity more complex. It was hard not to use our hands and gesture when explaining the designs!