GRADE 3

Is It a Plant or Nah?

Our theme for the year is “plants and pollinators.” We’ll be planning, carrying out, and sharing science, engineering, and history investigations using digital tools. We began by discussing what we think we already know about plants. We also made a list of some initial project ideas we might like to do.

After charting what we thought we knew and what we wanted to do, Mr. Smith asked the class to take what we knew about plants and figure out if harvest corn is a real plant or not for our first project. We noticed and wondered in our investigation journals. Then, we brainstormed investigation ideas like popping it, planting it, and putting it in water. We tried each of these ideas. The harvest corn popped, sprouted in water, and grew in cups of soil! We determined that the harvest corn was indeed the seeds of a corn plant.

Designing 3D Printed Planters

We started one of the projects that students had suggested: Creating 3D printed pots for plants. We discussed a number of things we should consider when designing: how to make a hole in a sold shape in Tinkercad, the size of the pot, holes drainage, how we might personalize our designs, and whether we might add holes for strings to hang a pot.

Building an Automated Watering System

One thing we noticed from our previous plant investigations was that we did not always keep up with watering our plants due to days off of school. To solve this problem, we used an example project with a micro:bit, servo motor, rubber bands, popsicle stick, tape, and straw watering arm to create an automated watering system. The apparatus automatically waters a plant when the soil moisture level is too low, which is measured by keeping track of the conductivity of the soil. (The more water the soil has, the more conductive it is.)  We realized we needed to make setup adjustments with the particular materials we used. This meant we needed to troubleshoot and iterate on our designs.

Coding Loops with Sphero Indi

We did some coding with Sphero Indi and color cards to create an algorithm in which the robot doesn't stop. This repeated pattern is a loop.

Rube Goldberg Devices That Water a Plant

We began using materials like peg boards, paper towel tubs, marbles, tape, pulleys, wooden downs, cups, toy car ramps, Legos, string, yarn, cotton balls, and cardboard to build Rube Goldberg devices that could knock over a cup of water to water a plant. We brainstormed, tinkered, tested, and iterated with the materials. Mr. Mark also taught us about simple machines.

Staying Safe and Kind on the Internet

We learned about digital citizenship with Interland, Common Sense Media, and from a guest speaker from the Office of the Pennsylvania Attorney General.