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Friday, June 23 STEMpower Expo!

After a week of incredible ingenuity, creativity, and persistence, our Builders, Designers, and Innovators put on their "Water Works" Expo! Students showed how they could build different designs that use water, move water, and move in water! Check out highlights of the Expo below! Thank you all for an amazing week.

Thursday, June 20th

After a week of incredible ingenuity, creativity, and persistence, our Builders, Designers, and Innovators put on their "Water Works" Expo! Students showed how they could build different designs that use water, move water, and move in water! Thank you all for an amazing week.

Roam the Foam!

This morning, our students had an amazing time with a foam cannon! Water, in it's myriad forms, is a blast!

Builders & Designers

This afternoon, our Builders and Designers began planning out their plans and building models of Water Parks. They considered what types of ways they wanted to use water, move water, and move in water.

Innovators

The afternoon challenge for the Innovators to make a dam with a usable moving door to allow water to flow at the designers discretion.

Wednesday, June 19th

The Dog Days Of STEMpower

Builders Word of the Day: Concentric- denoting circles, arcs, or other shapes which share the same center, the larger often completely surrounding the smaller.

This morning, our builders picked up where they left off, making improvements and iterations to their rafts. Focusing on the iterative Engineering design process allowed them to build fast and stronger ships.

Now with a mastery of bouyancy, the builders then were given the added challenge to maintain it while adding weight to their creations. Each student built contraptions that could hold at least twenty marbles while staying afloat.

In the afternoon, builders were inspired by pinwheels to design something that could move in concentric circle with water. After they planned out their designs the began work on the contraptions

Designers: Theme of the Day-Moving Water

Our Designers this morning considered the moving and channeling of water to different sources. They were given the collective challenge to make a system that moved water from a reservoir to several "homes" in a model town.

After Rest & Restore, the group got back together to reflect on what strategies and methods worked or needed improvement. They set out as a group to improve on their system

Innovators: Word of the Day:

Reflections: (noun)-The act of deeply considering past events to learn and grow from.

This morning, our Innovators worked on movement of water through syphons and then were challenged to add a filtration system to moving water. They were asked to reflect after each design and then improve their product.

In the afternoon, the innovators turns to irrigation systems that could also filter out different types of sediments.

It was a great and exhausting day!

Tuesday , June 18th

Builders

Word of the Day: Buoyancy (noun)-the ability or tendency to float in water or air or some other fluid.

This morning, after experimenting with different materials buoyancy, our builders used both found natural items and some given materials to make rafts and sailed them down our own little channel. They worked on making them sturdy and swift!

In the afternoon, the focus was on several iterations of a boat based on the knowledge they had gleaned from the morning activities.

Designers Word of the Day: Buoyancy (noun)-the ability or tendency to float in water or air or some other fluid.

This morning, our designers learned about what makes a good design sketch. After measuring out and making a plan, they worked to make boats out of tinfoil that could hold as many nuts and bolts as possible. We had boats that reached over a two hundred!

In the afternoon, the challenge was to make a neutral-buoyant ship out of any materials and best their tinfoil amounts. Students built several iterations of each craft to help improve on the design!

Innovators

Word of the Day: Gubbins (noun)-miscellaneous bits and pieces

This morning, our Innovators explored the concept of what makes a good design drawing. After learning about front, side, and bird's eye view, they applied it creating a working model of a water park. An excellent way to cool down!

In the afternoon, they were given the building challenge of making a movable water wheel.

Monday , June 17th

Builders

Word of the Day: Absorb- to take in or to soak up

In the morning, our Builders learned about the Engineering Design Process and then began their investigations into what types of materials absorb water. Students examined how absorption also works with color and paint.

In the afternoon, our builders took what they knew and applied it to the challenge of building a contraption that could absorb the most water. After each iteration, they dunked it in a tank of water and then squeezed out the water to see how much they had absorbed.

Designers

This morning, after creating their Design Notebooks, our Designers began their exploration into filtration. testing out on different types of substances, students tried to create a mechanism to filtrate water.

After Rest & Restore, our designers expanded their knowledge of filtration to work on Purifiers that could sift multiple types of contaminants out of water.