Welcome to Smashing Science!
Greetings!
My name is Joe Ranger and I am the instructor for Smashing Science. I am writing this letter to inform you about all of the awesome things we will be doing this summer in our classroom. If you like to build and experiment things, you’ve come to the right place because we will be building and experimenting all the time! This course is designed to be a project based engineering type class, which means we will spend our time with hands on materials and no homework!
In all the science classrooms I teach, safety is the number one concern. We must make sure that we are being safe in the classroom and with the lab materials at all times. Respect for one another is also something that I find to be very important. Science is fun, getting hurt is not. Let's all work hard at being safe and having a lot of fun!
Some of the cool stuff we will be building/experimenting in class this summer is: popsicle stick cars, catapults, crash test cars, egg parachutes, roller coasters and more. See you all soon, be ready to work hard and play harder!
Joe Ranger
My name is Joe Ranger and I am the instructor for Smashing Science. I am writing this letter to inform you about all of the awesome things we will be doing this summer in our classroom. If you like to build and experiment things, you’ve come to the right place because we will be building and experimenting all the time! This course is designed to be a project based engineering type class, which means we will spend our time with hands on materials and no homework!
In all the science classrooms I teach, safety is the number one concern. We must make sure that we are being safe in the classroom and with the lab materials at all times. Respect for one another is also something that I find to be very important. Science is fun, getting hurt is not. Let's all work hard at being safe and having a lot of fun!
Some of the cool stuff we will be building/experimenting in class this summer is: popsicle stick cars, catapults, crash test cars, egg parachutes, roller coasters and more. See you all soon, be ready to work hard and play harder!
Joe Ranger
Tuesday June 12: Welcome to SEEK!
Today was our first day or Project SEEK! We started the day by talking about science, what scientists do, and how they are similar to Engineers! Afterwards we were worked through our first challenge which was to build a tin foil boat that could hold the most amount of pennies and stay afloat. Check out the pictures below to see how it went!
Wednesday June 13th
Today was a day to finish up our second round of boat testing and we had some great improvement! After that we started our next big project, race cars! Check out the challenge below, we had some cool car designs!
Thursday June 14th
As we finished up our race cars, we got to send them down the ramp and race them! With some really cool designs, we had some very interesting races. Afterwards we were issued our newest challenge. To build "tornado towers". They have to be at least 3 popsicle sticks tall that can hold a full box of popsicle sticks and also not get blown over from giant wind gusts. We will test them on Friday!
Friday, June 15th
Today we tested our towers! We also worked on some physics simulations to help with torque, balance and how to draw simple circuits. Check out the photos below!
Monday, June 18th
Projectile motion was the name of the game today! We started a new project making catapults. Thats right, ancient siege engines for classroom warfare. Using our previous project towers, we set up castle defenses and had a little war! It was pretty fun, check out the pictures below to see it in action.
Tuesday, June 19th
Today was a day dedicated to learning about bridges. We started the day talking about torque, stress, sheer and tension forces. Afterwards we got our new challenge, which was to build a bridge out of 100 popsicle sticks that could hold the most weight!
Wednesday, June 20th
Today we started the day testing our bridges. With our excellent engineering skills, we built two bridges that held our students weight!
Thursday, June 21st
Extended day was a day for the ages. We started making Judo Bots, which are fighting popsicle stick robots that use hydraulics to move and flip each other over. With a huge battle royal at the end! Finally we started working on our Rocket project! Hopefully we can work on launching them tomorrow.
Marble Rollercoasters
The challenge for the last week of seek is to build the coolest marble rollercoaster imaginable. They need to incorporate some interesting features like a loop-d-loop, small hill, bank turn and a jump at the end. Check out the pictures below to see their hard work!