Year 11 Practical End-Of-Year Challenges..

The end of the year for seniors is closing fast, and my Year 11 class have finished all of their internals for the year. As their class doesn't sit any science exams at the end of the year, the last few days have been spent either sending students off to other classes to finish off any overdue work there, or... something else. 

"What should that 'something else' be?" I asked myself at the start of the last week. For some of my Year 11's, this week may be their last taste of science at school, ever. Others have chosen one of Tamaki's three science options in Year 12 and will experience another year or two. 

I decided that the best use of our last few days together would be to do practical science; designing a solution to a problem, testing it, making modifications, testing it again, and then of course a bit of healthy competition between the end-products.

Challenge 1

Our first challenge was to find the best launching strategy for the best shuttle, based off the activity from NASA and the Design Squad.

Full pdf of their activities can be found here:  https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/308966main_On_the_Moon.pdf 

Litani found the best way to use the balloon as a launcher was not to have it full, but instead to have only the smallest amount of air in the balloon and clap it shut, to push it out all at one time. He also found that the bendy end of the straw needed to be fully inside the balloon.  

One of the students, Mac, spent most of that lesson designing an arm-propelled shuttle (i.e. a shuttle he could throw rather than launch with the balloon) He built a brilliant one out of straws that looked a little bit like a Star Wars fighter plane with the x at the back. He weighted the middle of it with some rubber tubing, and it flew beautifully. 

Challenge 2

Mac's design gave rise to the second challenge; designing a plane to fly the furthest when thrown outside. I thought Mac would re-build his Star Fighter but instead he made a new creation!

Mac's new creation

Litani and Jordan opted for streamlined paper planes reinforced with bamboo skewers and weighted in the nose. They were also held together with sellotape. 

Litani and Jordan's planes

Jordan and Litani had a close battle, after Alex threw his 'UFO' entry...

As for Mac's entry... 

Duui was skeptical about the prowess of Mac's plane, and went and stood about halfway down the field and said there's no way it'd be able to get past him! You can see where he's standing in the video, and whether Mac's plane went past him or not...

Challenge 3

Our final challenge was to protect an egg dropped from a height. Students were given packs of equipment to use, including a plastic bottle, bubble wrap, 2 plastic plates, 4 straws, 3 pipe cleaners, a small newspaper, tinfoil, styrofoam beads, 2 balloons, scissors and unlimited sellotape. Each pack was missing one of these items and students got to choose which pack they wanted. 

Mac created a landing pod space shuttle sort of contraption. You have to open at least 3 hatches to see the 'egg-stronaut' in the pod! 

Litani created a parachute sort of contraption, with balloons attached later. 

Jordan created a sort of indestructible tank and quite cleverly; a landing pad! 

Zeph created a brilliant parachute contraption using the tinfoil between balloons and a cushioned suspension landing base that the egg sits on. His fell so gracefully when it was dropped!

Our first test was off the Marae deck at my shoulder height - and 100% off all drops were successful! All of the eggs survived, even with Onesi's drop of Duui's creation hitting Zeph's on the ground and bouncing up and off. 

We had to step up our testing to determine a winner. We went to B-block and dropped them off the second story balcony. 

And would you believe it, 100% of the eggs survived AGAIN!! 

As a last resort we went out into the quad and students launched their egg protectors up into the air, throwing them up as high as they possibly could! Finally we had four out of nine of the eggs crack. 

I was so impressed with the creativity of 1104 in this last challenge. They were engaged with the challenge of protecting their eggs, designing, standing on chairs to test how hard their creation landed, making modifications... It was so cool to see! 

I hope 1104 had a good year of science, and if they're taking Bio next year I will see them again; if not then I hope they leave science proud of the credits they've achieved throughout the year and with positive memories of their time learning science at Tamaki College :)

Earthquake Engineers

By the last day of Term 1 9KMn was ready to put what they had learned about earthquakes, P-waves and S-waves to the test! 

First I shared this presentation with students, who quickly flew through the vocabulary to get to the exciting practical! 

Once students could show me their finished vocabulary I gave them each 30 marshmallows (15 large and 15 small), and 24 sticks (8 long skewers, 8 medium skewers and 8 toothpicks). 

(Next time we do this activity I would give 30 large marshmallows, as the smaller ones proved little use).

The brief was to design a two-story building that would survive through the primary wave of an Earthquake without toppling over or crumbling. 

Jayden and Chase design a pyramid shaped structure. 

We would test their structure in a tray of jelly that simulates P-waves. Students would observe what happened with their design, record their observations, then make improvements to their structure. 

Autymn and Paris designed a cube-and-pyramid 2-level structure and got ready to test it...

The structure proved to be a bit wobbly - back to the drawing board! Perhaps more cross-beams needed? Failure is the best way to learn :) 

The overwhelming success for the day came from a group of boys - PJ, Antonio, Auri and Tionee. Check out the video below to see their design!

Click here to see an example of Autymn's finished engineer work, although noone in class had time to design a poster to sell their idea to an engineering company (on the last slide).

By the end of the lesson I wanted students to have learned that structures are more stable lower to the ground, if they taper or have less mass at the top, and if they have additional support from things like cross-beams.

To revise these principles we finished the lesson off with a class favourite - a Kahoot quiz! Click here to be taken to the quiz I made to summarize this lesson.

The idea for this lesson came from this webpage