December STEM Meeting Report

For winter fun we made homemade ice cream. For Science know- how we discovered how a solution (water and salt) has a lower freezing temperature than pure water (a solvent).  Since half and half, vanilla and sugar require a lower freezing temperature we were successful in using these concepts to create ice cream.

 

 

 

 

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November STEM: fun with Oobleck

We had messy fun making Oobleck. Who knew cornstarch and water could be so much fun? And you thought it was just for making gravy!

We did have instructions, you can’t just dump them together willy nilly. And fingers are great for mixing the ingredients, and did they get a work out! Mixing and stirring and mixing over and over again. The question is are we stirring a liquid or mixing a solid? Well, it is BOTH! It’s OOBLECK! A term for goo/goop first coined by Dr. Suess in His 1949 book And later accepted as an actual science term. Pick it up, it runs like a liquid, but fist bump it and it reacts like a solid…what? OOBLECK is a  non- Newtonian fluid because it does not fit the parameters set by Newton’s definition of a fluid. And now you know.

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 STEM October 2017

Catapults

Dowel rods, tongue depressors and rubber bands. That is pretty much all the scholars had to work with. It is harder than you might think to manipulate rubber bands to hold the dowel rods in place…where you want them, and the angle you want them. STEM presents so many challenges, even outside the lesson we set out to teach.

 

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We had a bucket challenge at the September meeting of our STEM Club.

We built straw structures to hold “buckets’ full of pennies. Each student was given 67 straws and an endless amount of masking tape. The tape was used to hold the straws together and the bucket (paper cup) was attached with string. The students were shown samples but given no specific instructions. So much creative engineering happened here. So much tape was used. And then we added pennies to the bucket. The test called for pennies. We thought candy would be more fun. A good lesson in weight versus volume. We compared the weight and volume of several types of candy. The pictures below tell their own story.

——————————————————————————————————————————————It’s time for us to begin our STEM program this school year! Sign-up starts September 14.