The past two weeks in STEM, the 3/4 class celebrated National STEM Day with a series of fun, STEM based projects! On National STEM Day, they explored STEM based activiites through stations that focused on science (physics of building), technology (coding), engineering (robotics), and math (measuring during a design challenge). After they reflected on their… Read more Celebrating National STEM Day
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class finished their inventions inspired by nature. The inventions included a flying/gliding suit inspired by a grasshopper’s legs, boats inspired by floating seeds and whale fins, cars inspired by aquatic and terrestrial spiders, and monkey bar gloves inspired by sloth’s claws and hands. The class analyzed different advertisements, including… Read more Biomimicry: Presenting the Final Inventions!
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class focused on their driving question, How can we use biomimicry to design and create a new invention, inspired by nature? They all chose natural structures to inspire new inventions, such as sloth claws that inspired a glove to help hang on to the monkey bars on the playground,… Read more Designing and Building the Final Invention!
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class returned again to our driving question, about how we can use biomimicry to design and create an invention inspired by nature. They went outside to explore structure and function relationships in our school yard: they drew any structures that inspired or interested them, and made notes about what… Read more Biomimicry: Designing the final invention!
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class continued investigating structure and function relationships in the natural world, and biomimicry. Their “need to knows” for this project are: What is biomimicry? How can we use nature as an inspiration? How do we design a new invention? How do we build an invention? How do plant… Read more Structure and Function: Animal Senses!
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class continued their investigation into structure-function relationships in living things. They focused on animal phalanges this week, and how the structure of the finger bones in different animals were specific to a particular function. They first looked at x-ray images of animal “hands” and based on the structure, had… Read more Biomimicry: Animal Hands
This week in STEM, the 3/4 class started investigating how inventors use nature to inspire their designs. The Driving Question for this project is, How can biomimicry help us design and create a new invention, inspired by nature? Throughout the project we will learn about structure-function relationships in plants and animals, the internal and external structures… Read more Exploring Biomimicry: Inventions Inspired by Nature!