Solar Ovens

After learning about the basics of how our atmosphere and Earth turn light energy into heat energy to keep Earth warm, students were challenged to use engineering skills and these science concepts to build a solar cooker that can cook hotdogs. We began the construction yesterday. With weather not ideal for using the sun's solar radiation to cook with this week, we will bring out inventions out into the sun next week to test them out.

Digital Textbooks?

This week, students wrote persuasive essays regarding textbooks. First, we learned what digital textbooks look like, what they are capable of, and their drawbacks by watching a few three-minute videos. We then read an article on the topic as well. Students then had to commit to either being for the move from traditional textbooks towards digital ones or believe that traditional textbooks are still best for learning based on current drawbacks to digital ones. Next, they wrote a speech, which used information from our multiple sources to back up their claim, aimed for Mrs. Williams, our principal. The speeches were written and then practiced. Finally, they were given to their peers in class. Coincidentally, the USA Today just had an article come out about New York City and Amazon signing an agreement regarding digital text books for that school district, which is the largest in the country. We connected this article in on Friday.

Revolutionary Era Games

Students read about three different games that kids played during the times of the Revolutionary War. Each student became a specialist in one of the games and taught it to a small group of students.

Potato Irish Famine

After spending the week of St. Patrick's Day learning about the historical Irish Potato Famine, which in part brought many Irish to the United States, we connected it to some science. Students were posed with the question: How much of a potato is the pulp? Students peeled and weighed to calculate. In addition, students learned that adding up the peelings and the pulp don't add up to the total weight of the original potato due to moisture loss and evaporation.

March 14th (3/14) : Pi Day

Today we celebrate math, focusing on what Pi is. We started off with a challenge of figuring out how much fencing in needed to fence a circular garden. Although many good strategies were used, even putting a string around the circle still produced answers that were not quite correct, as the string kept slipping as they measured. Putting this aside until the end of the day, we read a story book that helps students remember what diameter, radius, and circumference definitions are. Using this, we reversed the formula for finding circumference and instead tried to use it to find pi. Student groups measured the circumference and diameter of a variety of pizza "pies" in class then used calculators to see what happens when you divide circumference by diameter. Low and behold, our answers all produced numbers right around 3. Finding the class average, we ended with 3.13. Taking this further we discussed that the circumference is about 3 times the diameter, as this is what it showed us. In fact, it was taught we can get closer and it is about 3.14 times the diameter. The rest of the day will focus on extending this and using the formula Circumference= pi / diameter to solve problems. A challenge will occur to have students try to memorize as many numbers of the irrational number pi for a grade-wide contest on Thursday. We will read about how mathematicians came about to discovering pi, following the math of ancient Babylonians. Finally, we will end with completing the challenge of the circular garden again, but this time using the formula to see how much easier and accurate it is. Happy Pi Day!

Mass vs Acceleration vs Gravity

Our final lab in our "Gravity Unit" deal with mud puddles. We wanted to make a model that could be tested which involved throwing different weights of "rocks" into "mud". Obviously, this would be not only messy, but hard to collect accurate data on to see if more mass impacts how deep it goes due to gravity. After brainstorming in class, ideas such as jello, pudding, corn starch, and pancake batter came up to represent the mud. Walmart has the best price on flour, and just about every bag was purchased. For the rocks, Home Depot had different sized bolts that would work well. Megan had the idea on attaching a string to each bolt so that we could accurately measure how deep it sunk into the flour, while also making it easy to pull out. Our lab took two days. The first day we explored and collected data on different mass bolts and how far they sunk into the flour due to gravity after being dropped from 1 meter above the rim of a five gallon bucket. Averages were found for each group and then a class average was found. Patterns emerged and students used the data to predict the depth of a 80 gram bolt being dropped from the same height. Some groups were only over 3 mm, while everyone in the class fell within 1.5 centimeters of the actual depth. Discussions took place with models showing how it isn't that the heavier mass object falls faster, but the gravitons emitted by objects with more mass were being pulled down more by gravity.

Law of Conservation of Energy

As we have been learning about gravity and gravitation the past few weeks in science, today we connected in the Law of Conservation of Energy. Students saw first-hand that energy can't be created or destroyed, but can only be transferred. Using "Seismic Accelerators", we saw that energy can be transferred from several balls into a smaller one, making it bounce over 5X as high as it normally would.