Who knew that tape, string, balloons and straws could cause such excitement? We constructed balloon rockets and flew them along a string. Thank you again to the 4 O'Clock Faculty Blog for the idea. There was a lot of shouts of joy as the balloons either shot along their path or spun in place. This activity opened the door for lots of questioning about what worked or what did not. The students were able to make adjustments to the straws, tape and string to allow for faster rockets. I think the adults enjoyed the activity as much as the students.
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
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