The challenge on this week's STEM club was to build the tallest tower that could free stand while supporting a weight. Materials were limited so designs had to be carefully thought out. 4 teams embarked on the challenge. After 45 minutes 3 teams had successfully built a free standing tower. One of the towers could rival the leaning tower of Piza and so despite being free standing was not necessarily the tallest. That left two teams, with the winners being James Almond and David Bernard, with a tower of approximately 90 centimetres in height. 

In this week's STEM the pupils were challenged to build a parachute that would slow the descent of an object from a height of 1.52m. The winning parachute would take the longest time to fall. The design requirements were challenging, with a maximum area for the canopy being 124m2. After disqualifying some ingenious designs that bordered on breaching the rules of canopy size, we had 5 parachutes made within 40 minutes. The winning team managed a descent time of 0.855 seconds.  

We started our investigation by looking at the British Antarctic Survey clothing video and what being a blizzard looks like. Our inspiration was Captain Scott, who, with his team of scientists, set out to explore one of the World's most hostile environments.

We tested our blankets by wrapping them around our bottles.  We poured slightly cooled water into the bottles, up to the top, and inserted a thermometer.  We recorded how much the temperature fell over a 15 minute period.  To help simulate being in the Arctic, we put our tray outside, where it is currently only 2 degrees.

It was really close, but team ALBERT won, having lost only 11 degrees! Whilst we waited, our teacher  looked at the terms conduction, convection and radiation and how these are the ways of thermal energy being transferred.