I was very excited to have had the opportunity to teach STEM recently! Ms. Chapman and I had a great group of students. This page contains highlights from a few of our activities.
We were studying a wide variety of topics as STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. My hope is that we covered all topics in a fun and interesting way. Please note that our curriculum for this class was a dynamic class and was always under construction, but we followed the basic order of topics online and continued to make changes as needed. If you are new to STEM, you may find the attached brochure helpful. Let's step up to STEM!
This year's class will be taught by Ms. Saulters and I know the students are in for a treat!
UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
STEM Lessons - Table of Contents
Unit 1 Intro to STEM - Safety, Ethics, Notebooking & Teamwork
Unit 2 Physics - Buoyancy, Catapults and Newton's Laws
Unit 3 Engineering - Gears, Hydraulics and Torque, Oh My!
Unit 4 Programming and Coding - OG Style - Original Gaming
Unit 5 Robotics - VEX Connects
Unit 6 STEMathematics - Area, Volume and Built to Scale
Unit 7 Architecture - California Building
Unit 8 Space - Eyes on NASA
Unit 9 Energy - Going Green
Unit 10 Machines: Simple and Otherwise
Here's what we've been up to!
Balloon Cars
Build Your Own Newton's Cradle
Archimedes Squeeze - How many grams will your boat hold?
It FLOATS! We added the weights and then everything they could think to try to sink the S.S. Indestructible. It held more than 8 golf balls at 45g each! After that, they began adding everything they could think of to see how much it would hold. It held a ridiculous amount proving their theory that a greater surface area would strengthen their ability to stay afloat.
Catapults R Us
Our goal was to shoot lima beans as far as your catapult would go. The students all had unique designs and surprised us with shots that went over 7 meters in the parking lot. When weather became too wet, we shot marshmallows in the cafeteria and had some extremely accurate designs. We even had one student create and build a working trebuchet Way to move those marshmallows!
Paper Coasters
Right now we're designing and building roller coasters out of card stock paper. The goal is to create a design that will take a marble at LEAST 20 seconds to make it through the ride. Everyone's pitching in with ideas and hard work. Can't wait to see the finished products!
Images by © Phillip Martin 2005 – 2017. For more of his wonderful work, see http://www.phillipmartin.com