It’s week 2, and the students are starting to get past their first week shyness. We are happy to hear a lot more chatter in our virtual classrooms. But it wasn’t just all laughing and socializing! The students were all hard at work on their projects!
Minecraft: A Virtual Learning Adventure
With the tech issues mostly behind us, we jumped into a busy week of building! We finished the medieval castles we started last week and presented them to the class. The “big” project this week was our Egyptian pyramids. We each made our own massive pyramid. All our pyramids needed to have a zoo, an aquarium, and a McDonald’s or a cafe on the inside. Most of us build our McDonald’s on the outside, next to our pyramid. One pyramid even had a dojo instead of a McDonald’s. Some of us got very creative with our zoos and aquariums. There was a basement zoo and a glass ceiling aquarium. Ask us to give you a tour of our castle and pyramid worlds! We ended the week by starting on our next project, recreating Minecraft versions of famous landmarks.
Introduction to Robotics with Lego WeDo
This week, we continued to build and program our Lego WeDo robots. Our challenge was to build a spy robot, Milo the Science Rover! Once we built the basic robot we experimented with add ons for Milo including a motion sensor and tilt sensor.
Little Journalists
This week we worked on honing our interview and writing skills with articles on Science Olympics, Lego Machines, and Minecraft Session B. We also wrote personal interest stories on why O‘ahu is a great place to visit and why Sanoya is a great place to get ramen. We also explored photography, learning how a good photo can bring an article to life, and how to select the best photos for our stories. Please check out our newsletter and let us know what you think!
Robotics with Lego EV3
This week we experimented with using a lever to retrieve the Cuboid. We had to figure out how to program our robot to follow the straight line, retrieve the Cuboid, bring it to home base, and return it to where we picked it up. We had to figure out how to move or robot forward and backward using a variety of commands. It was challenging, but we got to work at our own pace. Mrs. Nagatoshi said, “I have seen students being resilient as they have different challenges occur with their robot and programming. I am very proud of how they are persevering through it all.”
STEM Workshop: Science Olympics
Week 2 was all about density, floating, sinking, and rising. First we shared our final 50 cm bridges from last week and then “dove into” a discussion about density and tested different objects in water. Pennies, erasers, and big paper clips sunk while aluminum foil, straws, and toothpicks floated. Many of us already knew about buoyancy and gravity, but we also explored surface tension by carefully placing small paper clips on the water so they could float like water striders (cool insects that can “walk” on water)! Next we built boats out of aluminum foil to try to hold 25 pennies. We found that flat “raft” boats couldn’t hold as many pennies as ones with curved up sides. Adding buoyant frames like straws helped to keep our boats afloat better. Last, we attached a “sail” made of paper or a balloon to help harness wind power!
Story Art, Smart Art, Let’s Get ARTed
This we wrote stories using our imaginations! Our first story described building wet sandcastles at the beach. Our next stories took our creativity even further! It was fun writing about silly watermelons and pineapples that can talk. We also wrote stories about monster madness.
Adventure Seekers Online
This week, we went on an adventure that was out of this world—we got lost in space! We built our own rockets and took a trip to the moon, learning a little bit about those who went there before us. In order to survive, we built our own moon habitat. With our moon mission a success, we then faced a perilous mission to Mars. But don’t worry. We all pitched in and made it safely back together!