ox Chapel Area FOX CHAPEL AREA SCHOOL NEWS
An O’ Hara student explained how he and his partner used the concepts of buoyancy, displacement, weight, and density to design and build a boat. Students used their student reflection journals throughout the innovative inquiry capstone.
The Fox Chapel Area student engineers explored through hands-on investigation and connection to real-world scenarios as they later completed other design challenges back at their own schools. Over the 10-week innovative inquiry capstone, they investigated the physical laws of bridge construction; investigated the forces of gravity and air resistance; explored relationships between buoyancy, displacement, weight, and density; experimented with the relationships between potential and kinetic energy; and investigated simple machines.
According to Kerr Elementary gifted support teacher Susan Kreit,“ Students are highly motivated, eager to participate, and are learning to work with others.”
O’ Hara students with their gifted support teacher, Marilyn Hall, tested to see how many marbles could be added without sinking their boat. This particular boat held 96 marbles.
Mrs. Kreit also said,“ Students are learning to be comfortable asking questions and posing problems, finding varied avenues to pursue answers, thinking flexibly when things turn out differently than expected, and making suggestions to peers about how they might improve a design.”
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Fifth grade O’ Hara student Darren Jayaratnam found that when he and his partner built their boat for the buoyancy challenge, that compact boats would sink.“ We learned about surface area,” he said.“ We made five different designs and we decided on a flat-bottom design.”
When Kerr fifth graders Jack Cannon and Katie Haas began to build and test their original design in the potential / kinetic energy challenge, things didn’ t go exactly as planned. Jack said,“ At one point the blocks started wobbling and collapsed.” The two discovered they had to use more blocks in order to stabilize their structure.“ We were expecting more turns. It was smaller than we thought,” Katie said of their structure. Their final successful design was about a foot high and had just one turn, but Jack and Katie were pleased because when they moved the lever that allowed the marble to release, it successfully rolled down the chute and landed in the cup.
For the final challenge, the 50 students gathered once again and worked in small groups at Kerr to design and build a Rube Goldberg machine, a complicated device that’ s built to perform a simple task. For the project, the students had to build an obstacle course for a marble. The students applied the knowledge they had gained throughout the innovative inquiry to create a minimum of three different engineering actions to achieve the task of watering a plant.
Kerr students designed a structure out of KEVA Blocks that carried a ball to a basket without an external push or pull.