Force and Motion

We began our science curriculum with a force and motion unit. After attending STEM TQ this summer, a two-week long teacher workshop involving STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) practices, I was really motivated to bring a lot of the things I learned into the classroom. One way of doing that was to bring a lot of design challenges where students are designing, building, engineering, and so forth.

This unit began with an iSlide experiment, learning a lot about push and pull, as well as an experiment involving ramps, different surfaces, and toy cars to determine speed and how the different surface types affect the motion of the toy car.

We have since then moved on to one of our design challenges, designing a balloon car. Each group could only "spend" $15 on supplies and had two days to create a design and execute the plan.

Balloon Car Price List and Design Plan

Many students planned and designed and quickly learned that their balloon cars failed. Only three out of six balloon cars moved a distance of more than zero inches. Unfortunately, we did have to stop our design challenge time so that we could discuss (and revisit) our norms of collaboration and teamwork. Hopefully, our redesign of this challenge will prove to be more successful than 50%.

The first car moved a total of 155 inches, and it probably would have gone even further if it had not run into the chair (another lesson learned). However, this car definitely will need a redesign because it did not use a balloon! :)

The second and third balloon cars didn't go quite as far, but any movement was a success this round! Hopefully, these two groups will redesign their balloon cars for further movement!

Look for our redesigns in a following post!

Marble Mazes

My wonderful fifth graders plunged into a GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) Force & Motion unit where everything science was embedded with literacy! Students read about force and motion while writing about force motion while speaking about force and motion and listening about force and motion! Phew! That's a lot of force and motion.

Then we came to the week everyone was waiting for: Marble Mazes via Simple Machines! The task was to design and build a marble maze using three of the six simple machines we were learning about. Students picked their partners and began the project by designing a model before building it. We brought in materials like toilet paper rolls, rubber bands, foam noodles, straws, cardboard (in various forms), and so forth.

Students had a whole week to imagine, innovate, and implement their designs! Here's a video that brings that week together with the students' marble maze runs at the end.

How do you let science grow in your classroom? We are looking for more science experiment/project ideas if you are willing to share! Drop a comment below! :)