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