Week of February 12-15

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This week, the 3rd graders improved their oil spill cleanup process, thinking about what worked well and not so well during their first process so they could make adjustments. They learned that changing the order of their steps could affect their results and that it's important to maximize their budgets. Check out the before and after picture below to see how much one group was able to improve the process the second time around!

These students carefully remove oil from a model river.

The 4th graders continue to add sensors and make their robots "smart." In the video below, the programmers use the touch sensor to change the direction of the robot. They also learned how to program the robot to multitask, or do more than one thing at a time!

Now that we've explored other inventors' patents, it was time for the 5th graders to come up with their own inventions/innovations to patent. I was so impressed with the students' creativity. In doing research on previous inventions, we realized how difficult it is to come up with a novel idea, but that didn't stop us! Stay tuned for Shark Tank style pitches on these inventions in the coming weeks!

Week of February 5-9

This week, the 3rd grade environmental engineers continued to move through the engineering design process to imagine possible methods to clean an oil spill. After coming up with a couple ideas independently, they shared these ideas with their team members and came up with one plan to implement first. These plans are scored using 3 criteria: cost score (we have a budget of $20 million), shore score (whether oil reached the shore), and ecosystem impact score (how much oil was left in the river). After we evaluate our first processes, we will ask more questions about what worked well and what didn't work, and we will improve our designs.

In 4th grade, we are learning how sensors can allow the robot to make decisions or to do certain tasks based on input from the environment. Our robots can now sense reflected light, colors, angles, and distance from objects!


In 5th grade, we learned all about patents and how detailed they must be in order for them to be granted. The following website has tons of great resources that explain the patent process and give samples (many of which have been filed by kids)! Next, we will be creating our own inventions or innovations and patents for these inventions!
https://www.uspto.gov/kids/guides.html