Today was 6th grades’ first day. They did a project with their nametags and got to personalize their journals. For snack they did an engineering challenge. Thete had to make a tool out of newspaper and tape to get their snack down off the wall. The students had fun designing their tools and helping eachother out with getting their snack down.

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Today, the 6th grade class learned a few new vocabulary words. These words were live load, dynamic load, dead load, and static load. Then they built K’nex bridges that were suprisingly able to hold a lot of weight. While adding weight onto the bridge, the students also recorded what parts of the bridge began to bend or seem weak. They found out that the longer a bridge is, the more support there will need to be in the middle of the bridge in order for it not to colapse or bend inward.

Today, the students continued to explore Kinect building blocks. The class later moved to a Carousel activity where they wrote down all they knew about the science and engineering terms. In a seperate group, there were 3 students who were put to the task to build a tower out of popsicle sticks, binder clips, and clothespins. They had a very difficult time connecting the popsicle sticks and building up, but evenually they caught on and were able to build a tower. Although it was not very stable, they were able to keep adding onto it.

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Today the class had a guest speaker, Mr. Nemeth, he came to talk to the class about the Walgreens net zero store to hopefully spark some ideas for the class to use in their green homes, or incorporate some things they saw in the video they were showed, to their home. For Math, everyone got the oppurtunity to look up the cost of any necessary applainces that they would have to have in their homes or might not have depending on their green home’s location. Each group was also able to look up the cost to power their homes using the specific energy source each group was assigned. To try and get into the swing of things, everyone tried out the Google sketch up program on the laptops to mess around with it and get an idea on how they will make their home.

 

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Today the 6th grade class worked on a webquest to help them learn more about building bridges. In addition, the students also learned about certain mistakes that have happened with the design of bridges, which have caused accidents, such bridges collapsing, to occur. After completing the web quest, the 6th grade class experimented with kinect building blocks to see how the blocks would work when building a bridge.

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Today the 6th grade class worked on finishing the paper tables that they began building 3 sessions ago. They built their tables out of rolled up newspaper and tape.  The students had to work within their groups to build a table that could withstand the most amount of physics books as possible using only the materials given.  Some groups such as Star, The Gee, and Lil’Y held up to 9 physics books!

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Today, the 6th grade class was challenged by Mrs. Flowers to get a toy car as close as possible to the specific distance. The toy cars were controlled by a balloon. The students had to blow up the balloon, then when they were directed to, they were to release the balloon to make the car move. The closer you got to the end point given, the better. The lesson for today was to help the students better understand what force was moving the balloon car and how much air was needed in the balloon to move the car far enough to reach the distance needed.

 

Today the class got to take their kits from last session to construct some actual bridges to test their strength. They will be adding weights and a basket of water bottles to the bottom of their bridge. After they’ve done their testing they will record their data about the bridge built and use those findings to contribute it into their bridge project.

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Today, the class got into a little introduction on trusses so they can use that information to build their bridges for the end of the year presentations.

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