Monthly STEM challenge

STEM Challenges are a fantastic way of engaging children in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. A model used at Avoch Primary was to mix up the children into different age STEM groups (4 per group). Every month the children would take part in STEM challenges with a teacher leading a different STEM activity. This would rotate each month until the children had completed the 5 different STEM challenges. The children would work together to solve the challenges! It was great fun. The teachers also loved this day of the week!

Creepy Classroom: Halloween STEM

Spooky Science

Magical Maths

Devilish D&T

Creepy Computing

Shrunken Heads

Core and skin an apple, dipping it in a mixture of lemon juice and salt to keep it from oxidising too much (browning)
Carve out the eyes, nose and mouth then dip the apple in the lemon and salt again.
Put an oven on its lowest temperature and place the apple inside. Keep checking the apple and remove once it has dried out and shrunk!
Decorate the apple, perhaps using a needle and thread to stitch up a mouth or eye. Use rice to add teeth, add witches hat or wool for hair.

Witch's Brew

Challenge pupils to design a potion which will turn their teacher into a toad. Each recipe needs 24 legs to complete the potion. Using a combination of bats, spiders, and frogs, how many different varieties can they make?

Trick or Treat?

Use their bucket full of sweets for some information handling or sorting with a Venn Diagram.

Pumpkin Possibilities

Measure some pumpkins and find out if the biggest is also the heaviest.

Supernatural Scenes

A greeting card company has a problem; they want a new range of Halloween cards which use mechanism to come to life but the don't know where to begin.

Examine other cards with moving parts and allow pupils time to investigate the mechanisms which make them work: levers and linkages. Show the pupils other examples of levers and linkages in the real world and talk about how they make work easier.

Give pupils time to plan, make, and evaluate their Halloween cards, complete with supernatural scenes and moving parts.

Creepy Computing

Try linking Halloween to computing by using Scratch to create games and stories. Pupils could create characters that change costume to become skeletons or ghosts when caught by the witch or vampire.

Monster Maze

Monsters luck in eerie mazes watching to catch unsuspecting victims. Use this as a context for some digital activities. Create a track for Beebots or Spheros on the floor with monsters that need to be avoided. Pupils can write instruction or code for the route and try it out, giving them a chance to make changes if needed.

These ideas and more from STEM Learning, for more ideas visit: www.stem.org.uk/lxqp4

Beads & Seeds: a STEM Challenge for Maths Week Scotland

Hydrogels are polymers that can retain many times their own weight in water. They are used in lots of everyday materials such as nappies and hair gel. In this experiment students will investigate how much water can be absorbed by the beads and what influence adding salt to the water has on the amount of water absorbed.

Winter STEM challenge ideas

Design a sledge which will slide the greatest distance down a slope. Materials you might want to use include lollipop sticks or lego.

Build the tallest paper free-standing snowman you can (or perhaps you'd like to try the snowman with the biggest volume?)

Experiment with snow (or fake snow - there are lots of recipes on the internet, or you can you the inside of nappies).

Ask questions such as: how much liquid is in snow? How fast does snow melt? What happens if you mix snow and water? What affects how quickly snow melts? Which group can melt snow the quickest? Which material will insulate a snow man and stop it from melting? How does snow affect ice? I'm sure your pupils will come up with some of their own!

Engineer a solution. How could you capture a snowflake so it takes a long time to melt? Could you catch it then explore it under a microscope?

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