Week of December 18-22

***Calling all 5th grade inventors!!! The 2018 Young Scientist Challenge is now open! Click HERE to find out how to enter.***

This week, the 3rd graders learned about ecosystems. We created a model food web to show how the living and nonliving things in an ecosystem are connected. Every single organism in our web was connected to the river in some way. This helped us understand how much devastation an oil spill can cause!

In 4th grade, we worked on programming our robots to move straight (forward and backward) and some groups began exploring curved moves. We learned that there are different modes you can use to tell the robot what to do. For example, you can use degree mode, rotation mode, on for seconds, and more to move the robot a certain distance. We used our math skills to figure out that one rotation is equal to 360 degrees. Some groups even found the circumference of the wheel in order to figure out how to get the robot to go a certain distance!

In 5th grade, we went on an invention hunt around the school and identified inventions as either type II (known problem with unknown method to solve it and unknown solution - like fans) or type III (unknown problem with unknown method to solve it and unknown solution - like the Promethean Board). We discussed how inventors have to be observant problem-finders and think up ideas that people didn't even know they needed. Some classes then learned about the 4 steps in the inventive process: idea, invention, innovation, improvement. Our challenge was to take the invention of cardboard and create an innovation and improvement using that invention. We will continue to work on this after the break.