Week of January 16-19

This week, the 3rd grade engineers tested materials to see how well they contain and remove oil. Some materials worked very well to soak up the oil (nylon) while others soaked up water and repelled the oil (the sponge). With this knowledge, we will be able to make informed decisions when designing an oil spill clean up process.

3rd graders test oil spill clean up materials

The 4th graders continued to program their robots to do all sorts of things- make different types of curved moves (see video below), have the robot complete an obstacle course, go around a baseball diamond, move an object with an arm that lifts up and goes down, and much more! The students are doing a great job at understanding and explaining how the programming blocks afffect the robot's behavior!

In 5th grade, we discussed how some inventions (like the flushing toilet) were invented way ahead of their time, and they didn't have the supporting technology to make them really useful. We made a tech web to show all of the supporting technology necessary to make Gorilla Glass and other inventions successful, and we realized that many of these webs included electricity as a necessary supporting technology. We then did a little research about electromagents and how they are used in inventions and created our own electromagnet! After some experimenting, the students discovered that tighter coils made the electromagnet stronger.

These students used twice as much copper wire and a tight coil to make their electromagnet stronger!