Keep It Up Challenge

       This week's challenge was to use paper, scissors, tape, paper clips, and/or rubber bands to keep a piece of paper aloft as long as possible. Some students definitely veered towards airplane designs, but some student tried creating parachutes, small pieces that float on their own, large pieces that catch the air as they drop, and by the end, even a couple helicopters.

       Afterwards, we watched some clips on the sports science of paper airplanes and tosses, a world record throw from Japan, and how to create a helicopter with a small piece of paper. We ended the period with some free design and play with some still trying to connect three helicopters together with paper clips (with no success).

       Be sure to look at some of the photos and short clips of the helicopters in action at the bottom.

Teacher Blog - Medieval Free Dress

     The star student of each week is selecting the free dress theme and this week was medieval. I decided to bring in a couple helmets and props and let the students take some staged photos and quite a bit of fun they had indeed. Some of the characters that dressed up this week were a princess, a jester, a monk, and a few peasants, and even a witch/wizard.
Disclaimer: No students were injured in the making of this post.

Teacher Blog - Beanstalk Challenge

     Each Thursday our class has been participating in various challenges, sometimes in small groups or pairs. So far we have had a problems such as connecting nine dots in an array with only four lines, figuring out patterns of numbers, and ordering words based on alpha-numeric values.
     This past week we turned to an engineering challenge as each student had exactly 10 pipe cleaner and nothing else to try and create the tallest structure. Although there were great questions (and even attempts) to bunk the challenge by hanging their structures or securing them to table legs, the variety of "beanstalks" as we called them was great and had quite a few able to successfully make theirs stand even in the short 15 minutes they were given. Take a look at some of the students at work and with their "beanstalks."