Week of January 16-20

This week, the 3rd graders continued to test materials and evaluate their usefulness in cleaning up an oil spill. We also did some research to find out what materials are used in real oil spills and how they compare to the materials we used in our model. Now we are ready to begin imagining and planning our oil spill cleanup processes!

In 4th grade, we had many robots successfully complete the obstacle course! You can check out an example below. Next, we are adding an arm attached to another motor so we can move things around the room!

In 5th grade, we pitched the inventions we created from a part of the technology we dismantled last week. We realized that the inventions that received the most interest from investors were the ones that were original and appealed to a large audience. We also did some research on the inventing styles of Edison and Tesla and looked at how they used FFOE (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration) when inventing. Next, we talked about steps in the creative problem solving process. We identified a problem affecting the students at Menlo and began gathering facts and info about the problem in order to prepare to brainstorm possible solutions. That is what we will work on next week.