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Lessons 1–3
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Claw Grabber
Build a concertina grabber to pick up as many balls as you can in one minute! Have fun while learning about levers and mechanical advantage. The children also explored how to make the grabbers stronger and more controllable. Glider and helicopter Escape the tower by building a helicopter then fly away in your glider. Have fun while learning about unusual aircraft. The children also saw how different positions of the wings and weights was critical to how well the aircrafts performed. Catapult Build a catapult and fling a ball as far as you can. Have fun while learning about levers and triangles in building. To make this work, we learnt about how triangles can make a weak material (straws) perform in a way not otherwise possible. The children had a lot of fun flinging paper balls across the room. Flip Book animation Create your own movie by creating a flip book and drawing characters. Have fun while learning about the way the way the eye and mind create the illustion of movement. This activity provided an unexpected challenge of demonstrating just how small the differences needed to be between each page to make a relatively smooth animation. Bridge Build a bridge to cross a 1m gap that a matchbox car can travel along. Have fun while learning about making a structure, strong, rigid and flat. Many different types of structures were attempted. A couple of students showed unusual perserverance by asking for their structure to be kept for the next week for them to continue with. Wearable Build something to wear using Strawbees. Have fun while learning about adapting materials to fit a specific purpose. This was interesting as the children were not given any specific items to make and to decide on something of interest for themselves. We ended up with crowns, hats, necklaces, shirts and more! Egg protector Drop an egg from 1m without cracking the shell. Have fun while learning about how to contain a fragile object and decelerate it without it breaking. The eggs were hard boiled and allergies were checked before this activity commenced. Again a great variety of designs were constructed with a few of them succeeding. Bow and arrow Build a bow and shoot an arrow as far as you can. Have fun while learning about prototpying (how to perservere to make a seemingly simple construction operate as intended). To construct the bow and arrows was not difficult, however to get the arrows to fly a decent distance required several small tweaks to the design. This required the children to push through their frustrations and identify what was preventing their project from working they way they wanted it to, and then modifying their bows and arrows. |
Term 4
Projects anticipated for next term include:
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