The Big Project - Phase One Construction Team

Thank you so much to Mr. Jason Rogers who joined the construction team today (Colin, Josh & Trinity) to help us determine materials for phase one of The Big Project.

We seriously under-estimated the cost of the buddy bench and learned the importance of having other people check our estimates before making a proposal for costs. We are in the process of re-designing the buddy bench to make sure it falls within our budget.

With Mr. Rogers' help, we have created a complete list of materials needed for our outdoor garden boxes. He had some excellent suggestions on how to build our boxes so they will be modular and durable.

Investigating Force & Pressure

What does a running shoe and a stiletto heel have to do with force and pressure?

We did a demonstration showing what happens when you step on a block of plasticine with the heel of a running shoe compared to the stiletto heel. The result was pretty dramatic! The stiletto heel punched a hole right through the block of plasticine but the trainer only flattened it a bit.

We discussed the factors that didn't change (force of gravity, plasticine, weight) and determined the only factor that changed was the surface area of the heel exerting the force on the plasticine.

Our next step is to determine the formula for pressure.

Buoyancy Challenge

We have been using our understanding of buoyant force and sinking depth to design devices to float a 965-gram mass. The materials? One piece of cardstock and some masking tape!

Colin's device stayed afloat the longest -- 50 seconds!

All students reflected that this kind of challenge really helped them understand concepts on a deeper level and that having more than one opportunity to design and test different devices helped them use their observations to make more effective designs.

Strategies to Divide a Whole Number by a Fraction

There were a couple of "aha" moments as we were learning about dividing a whole number by a fraction.

First, Brianna observed that dividing a whole number by a fraction less than 1 always results in a bigger number.

Second, Jersey and Logan determined that a shortcut for dividing a whole number by a fraction is to multiply the whole number by the denominator of the fraction and then divide by the numerator of the fraction.