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Welcome to the first couple of days of 8th grade science and engineering. The goal of our first two class periods is to create a team and establish our team work norms. Day 1: Paper Towers Students began be creating our classroom good teammate norms. Click the link here to see what they came up with! To test these qualities out, we engaged in our first engineering challenge! Our task was to create a structure capable of holding the most mass off of a table 1 inch using nothing except 3 pieces of printer paper and a "Noffy" length of masking tape. Students were given 20 minutes to build and test their structures and then another 20 minutes to rebuild/redesign to see how much they could grow. The team that achieved the greatest mass held 270 pounds of books. The team that achieved the greatest improvement more than doubled the amount of mass their structure could hold. Here are a few of the teams solving this problem! Day 2: Breakout EDU Teamwork Today we practiced using our norms by participating in our first Breakout EDU game on Teamwork. Breakout EDU is like an escape room--students must solve puzzles and clues to break into a box that has many, many locks in it. Check it out! Today the students had 8 locks to solve in 30 minutes or less. They were unsure of it when they began, but by the end of the day they all wanted to do another one at least once a week. We will be playing Breakout at least once per month for the rest of the school year! Watch the video below to see what they did!
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Clean water is something that we take for granted in the United States. Each day, we turn on our faucets and assume that the water coming out is safe for us to drink. But is it? For the community of Flint, MI this assumption was rocked when they faced high lead levels after there was a change in the source of their water. Click the video below to learn about it: This problem was the basis for our Summer STEM Ignition PBL. During the week of June 6th, new students to STEM Lab and STEM Launch engaged with many learning opportunities to answer the question "How do we ensure our water is safe to drink?" During the week, we had guest speakers, conducted science experiments, went on a field experience to a waste water and drinking water facility and then created solutions to answer the problem. Click on THIS LINK to see what we did! On Friday, students presented to a panel of water quality experts. They introduced their solutions with a sales pitch and then showed an iMovie introduction to the solution. They then gave a detailed description of their prototype. Curious about other solutions? Check out our full playlist of iMovies HERE.
How would you solve this problem? Leave some ideas in the comments below! |
AuthorMrs. Noffsinger is the 8th Grade Science and Engineering educator. Archives
August 2017
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Photos used under Creative Commons from Howdy, I'm H. Michael Karshis, r.nial.bradshaw