Thank you for joining us for our first summer online! We missed seeing all of your faces last summer! And while we aren’t in-person this yet this year, we can at least see all of your smiles and enjoy hearing your stories and watching your creativity!
Minecraft: A Virtual Learning Adventure
Thank you for your patience and perseverance as we worked to get every student logged into our Minecraft world. Our first challenge was to express our building talents and creativity by creating our own treehouses. After a day of crazy construction, we presented our amazing creations to our classmates! We went on to design our own green houses and finally, a castle. We got to build the castles in our own worlds so that we could continue to work on our projects over the long weekend!
Introduction to Robotics with Lego WeDo
To kick off this first week, we learned all about our Lego kits and the WeDo software. We started by building different robots like ‘The Fan’ and ‘The Satellite’. We learned that our robots had different uses. Using the WeDo software, we were able to control our creations and make them do different things. We were encouraged to use our imagination to develop new programs for our robots and to make modifications to the original design to make them better or to do different things.
Little Journalists
This week the Little Journalists began by practicing our interviewing techniques on other members of the class. We also selected the title and theme for our weekly newsletter. Pairs of students conducted our first full interviews. We can’t wait to edit and publish our first newsletter!
Robotics with Lego EV3
We had an exciting week of building and programming. We did face some first-week hurdles with missing parts, but your children were resilient through it all. We had two assigned challenges this week. The first challenge was to program our robot to drive on a straight line. The second challenge, built on that by having us program the robot to drive to the end of the line, grab the cuboid, bring it back to the beginning of the line, return it to the end of the line, release it, and return to start again. It was amazing to see everyone’s reactions as we worked hard on our building and programming.
STEM Workshop: Science Olympics
We started the week by getting to know each other. We introduced ourselves and shared what we enjoy doing most in the summer. For Week 1 our focus was on learning about towers, bridges, and arches. We began by investigating what makes structures strong using straws and tape to build the tallest tower we could that would hold pennies as high as possible. Our towers ranged from 9.5 to 46.5 cm tall. Some were able to support 50 pennies and probably could have held more! With our first structure complete, we then used a variety of common materials to build, test, modify, and retest our structures.
On Wednesday and Thursday we worked on bridges. We started by drawing what we thought of when we pictured a bridge in our head. Then we were challenged to build an index card bridge at least 20 cm long that a toy car could roll over. After learning about different types of bridges: beam, suspension, arch, and truss, we tried to modify our bridges to span 50 cm which was quite a challenge. The next step was to challenge the bridges to hold 6 times the original mass of the car (by adding 10 pennies as cargo). A lot of thought was put into various solutions for stabilizing and strengthening the bridges with trusses and piers (supports underneath). We are still working on perfecting our bridges and will continue with arches next week.
Story Art, Smart Art, Let’s Get ARTed
We started off our first week by drawing! We learned to draw magical unicorns, daring dragons and playful pugs. After drawing and coloring our creatures, we wrote fun stories that included characters, settings, and epic events.