Skip to main content

Canoe Building

Canoe Construction began today. Our Young Scholars attempted to take their 2D desgins into 3D. One question I received early was, "Does it have to look like the picture?" I replied that changing the design is part of the engineering process. The students also ran into the challenge of limited resources. I only a few pieces of wood scraps available. The students then had to configure their designs to the resources available and with the tools available. I am very curious how many of the canoes will float. There were large amounts of tape and glue involved in the construction phase. We will continue construction tomorrow and test the canoes in water.
The library was a busy and energetic place to be today. We even had visitors. Ms. Acuna and Ms. Rasmussen from the district office came to see our summer program. It was a perfect day to see the students deep into the engineering process. Our new principal, Mr. Welch arrived today as well. The students were eager to share their design process with him and to show him how MobyMax works.
The best part for me was that we had our largest group to date 42 students!



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ollies and Math

Thanks to generosity of Chevron through Donors Choose , my math class experienced a new mobile technology, Ollies! Ollies are programmable robots made by  Sphero . We used the app,  Macrolab  to program the Ollies. I modified a lesson from the Sphero website to teach the concepts of measurement and data. The first day, we explored how to program the Ollies and how changing the variables in the program affected what Ollie did. The students recorded data to capture what they were seeing. On day 2 it was time to be more methodical with our data collection. Students only changed one variable at a time. This allowed students to discover the relationship between time and the distance that the Ollie traveled. The students changed the variable of the delay between the roll and stop commands to develop this understanding. There was definitely a lot of excitement and motivation to learn measurement. On Day 3, we analyzed the data recorded from each group. There were some noticeable differences
2 comments
Read more

Roller Coasters

The students chose words to describe roller coasters. We recorded them using  Answer Garden . I think it also describes what building roller coasters is like. There was a buzz of excitement as groups of students designed and constructed marble roller coasters. One of the student remarked, "This doesn't look like regular library time." He had just asked me if he could tape the roller coaster ramp to the wall and was shocked when I said, "Of course." The students were so engaged with their projects that they did not notice a visitor from the  Hillsboro Tribune . Kathy Fuller came to learn about what was happening in our building this summer. We are proud that we will be featured in the newspaper. I will make sure to include the link in a future post. We will be continuing our roller coaster construction tomorrow. I am very thankful that our custodial staff is supportive of these messy projects. This video captures the feelings expressed in the wordl
Post a Comment
Read more

Halfway

I am taking it as a positive sign that we are halfway through our summer program and there is still tons of positive energy. Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Ayala's phone calls resulted in 5 new students today! We are expecting even more new students on Monday. My hope is that we can bring the average daily attendance to 40 students. This article affirmed our purpose for the summer program and pushing the students to work on their math skills in addition to reading. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5891583/summer-slide-achievement-gap-vacation I am looking forward to comparing their end of the year MobyMax math placement with their beginning of the year placement test score. Plans for next week... Model canoes, gardening, writing a Scratch character description and an art project 
2 comments
Read more