Schedule Changes & October 28th Meeting-- Hot Rod Hampster

***Our webinar for October 30 was cancelled.  It will be rescheduled for sometime in November, hopefully.  We will keep you updated as we get new information. 

***We have been having so much fun with some of projects that we have gotten a little behind schedule.  For this reason, we will be moving the Parent Night to November 18th.  We will be sending out invitations for this evening very soon!!!

On Monday the students were presented with a problem.  Hampton the Hampster wanted to be as fast as Tillman the skateboarding dog.  So Tillman asked the kids to build cars that Hampton could ride in to help him keep up with Tillman.  The students were given a list of materials they could use and how much each item costs.  They then had to come up with their design and purchase the materials at the store.  Finally, they built Hampton's cars. 

Below are some pictures of the test runs completed by the groups cars. 

Next week (November 4th) the students will get to make some last minute adjustments to their cars and then test them. We will then start to build a car that will hold an egg and be raced at parent night.  For this project we are asking the students to bring in any type of "trash" that they would like to use to build the "egg car." 

Oct. 21st Meeting

FINALLY!!!

At IMSA on Monday the 21st we finally got to test all of the things we have been working on in the last few meetings.
I must say that it seemed as though the kids LOVED it!
Below are a few picture of the groups in action with a brief description of the things that were done.

1st-- Finally the grass on our green roofs had grown in completely.  So we got to take those out into the courtyard and tested which shoebox would keep a cooler inside temperature, the green roof or the tiled roof.  In most of our groups we saw that the green roof would actually keep the inside cooler and therefore help with utility costs of buildings that choose to install them.     

2nd-- We had several different targets that were previously made.  These were used to test our catapults.  We had the student groups time the "air time" of the projectile after it was shot. 

We also had a contest to see which groups catapult would shoot the projectile the furthest into a bucket. (we measured this by the number of floor tiles between catapult and bucket.) 

 Finally, we had an accurracy contest between groups. We let each member shoot the catapult and try to hit the same spot as the other members in their group.

 

Pictures of the activities from 10-7-13

 The following pictures are from last nights meeting.  The pictures are of the students making targets and catapults out of various objects.  The targets and catapults will be used at the next meeting to see which groups design will fire the furthest and which is the most accurate.

10-7-13

Today at IMSA it will be all about CATAPULTS!!

We will be doing the following:

1.) Introduction Minute To Win It Activity with Marshmallows and Paper Plates
2.) We will then be making our catapults with rubber bands and popsicle sticks
3.) We will also be making targets so that we can test distance and accuracy.
4.) We will test our catapults.

This will be a very full IMSA meeting, yet a very fun one.  We are looking forward to see who can build the catapult that will shoot the furthest and which one will be most accurate.

On a side note.... Our green roofs are growing very well and will hopefully be ready to test the next time that IMSA will meet. 

Sept. 30th Meeting

At our second meeting the kids participated in the following activities:

1.) Paper clip Catapults
2.) Making of Targets
3.) Green Roofs assembly

We started with attendance and discussing future meetings/snack schedule.  We also discussed the IMSA trip and money collection.  We then watched a youtube video on how to make the paper clip catapults.  We then made the catapults, discussed targets and made some, and finally we tested our catapults.  After that we then took our research on green roofs from our previous meeting and built our own green roofs and shingle roofs.  We are letting the green roofs grow the grass so that then we can proceed with our experiment comparing the two types of roofs.  In the upcoming meetings we will also be delving further into catapults!