In 4th grade, we have been talking about aerospace engineers and what their jobs entail. Students have discussed various aspects of each planet, and designed a spacecraft to visit a planet of their choice. They had to act as an aerospace engineer. They had to take into consideration at least 3 aspects they discovered about their planet when designing their own spacecraft. From there we went on to design parachutes. These parachutes had to fit (by the end of this unit) on their spacecraft and had a mission of their own. To have a successful parachute, they had to determine what material, length of suspension lines, and a canopy size that would be best to land on a planet with an atmosphere thinner than Earth's; with a minimum drop speed of 5 feet per second.
Since we had already talked about gravity in the unit above....we decided to continue by determining how gravity effects us here on Earth. We used Issac Newton's 3 laws of Motion to investigate his laws in relation to simple machines. Student's created various lego creations and identifying the simple machines present in their creation. Over the past couple of weeks 5th grade has been working on designing electrical alarm circuits. We have discussed parallel and series circuits. Students are using this knowledge to create a mobile device that uses a battery, motor, wire, and a switch. They were given supplies from my room to construct their mobile device, but they were told they could bring in extra supplies if they so choose. They have loved doing this!
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October 2015
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