Our 4th week of the summer program was all about building towers. The students built towers from index cards, Q-tips, rubber bands, Legos, and playing cards. The constraints of the building projects changed each day. One day they were allowed to manipulate the cards by bending and using tape, other days they could not. As they worked with the variety of materials they learned about the properties of the materials and how to build with them. The students challenged themselves to build the tallest free standing tower possible. They tried to build their tower so that it stood taller than the tallest student. Along the way they discovered which structures were the most stable. Ideas for these building challenges came from Educating Young Engineers and Teacher Web from Canyon Middle School.
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
Comments
Post a Comment