STEAM Cycle 26 & 27

Kindergarten-Design a Cast

The diagnosis from the doctor is in and Angelina has broken her arm.  The students worked together through the engineering process to design a cast for a member of their group.  The students learned about criteria and constraints as they had to make sure the cast was strong, light, comfortable and water resistant.  They had a limited amount of time and supplies to create the cast.

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 1st Grade-Take Cover 1

In this design problem, students designed a covering for a playground to protect students from UV exposure.  They used UV-sensitive beads and a UV flashlight to determine the effectiveness of their design to protect students playing on the playground.

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2nd Grade-Save the City

The students worked individually to read a map of a city and identify homes that may be in the path of a landslide. Working in small groups, the students designed and tested a solution to prevent erosion of the hill and save the homes.

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3rd Grade-Seed Solutions 2

At the end of our last lesson, the students began growing pea plant seeds.  Using 3 generations of seeds, the students identified the color of the stems and determined the dominant (purple) and recessive (green) stem colors.  Using the Punnett Squares, students determined the parent plant genotypes and how these genotypes were passed on to the crossed plants creating the possibility of green and purple stems in the 3rd generation of plants.  The students created an Educreations (iPad app) presentation with photographs, text, and a voice-recorded explanation.

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4th Grade-Data Collection & Display (4)

Using the Tynker iPad App, the students are learning to code their first game by following step-by-step directions.  The students coded the characters in the game to respond in an effort to gather data.  Each time one of the characters touched another character, a count was displayed on the screen.

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5th Grade-Disease Detectives

There is an illness spreading at our fictional school.  Using the Patient Information Sheet, the students made correlations between the students in the class and the activities they participated in together.  Using data from the sheet, we determined how long the fictional students had been sick and how they interacted with one another to pass along the illness.  Using Educreations (an iPad app), the students created a diagram or flow chart to illustrate how the illness was spread and made conclusions about Patient Zero.