Welcome to Mrs. Williams' STEM Page!Questions/Comments/Concerns? Contact me:
[email protected] |
WHY STEM? |
Tower STEM Challenge (Try this at Home!!) |
We live in a world where many of the jobs our students will hold haven't even been invented yet. With technology constantly growing and changing, our students need to be prepared with a set of skills that enable them to find solutions to problems, not answers to questions. The philosophy behind STEM teaching is to challenge students to develop their critical thinking and problem solving abilities by giving them opportunities to apply the principles of these subjects to design solutions to real-life problems. Through these challenges, students will learn the value of teamwork and communication while deepening their knowledge of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
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In this quick, "Build-It" Challenge, second grade students were given small plastic cups, jumbo popsicle sticks, and foam dice. Students were tasked with building the tallest tower they could in just 5 minutes. They had to work in teams and only one person could add one item at a time. The next student had to add on to the construction of the previous student. At the end of 5 minutes, we measured to see who created the tallest tower. Check out some of the amazing design ideas below!
Variations: Build a Tower with only 1 block as a base, Build a tower that uses at least 3 of each type of material, build a tower that is asymmetrical, etc. |
Hour of Code 2018!
For the first year, Salt Creek Primary and Stella May Swartz will be participating in the National Computer Science Education Week's Hour of Code. To learn more about the event, click the button below. Here at SC, Kindergarten through fourth grade partnered up for an introduction to the basics of computer programming language and block coding! Our middle school friends from Albright, along with Mr. Busse also came along to assist in the event and make this a district wide program!
Halloween Fun with Kindergarten
In this short STEM challenge, kindergarten students teamed up to design and build a gate out of paper roll tubes, popsicle sticks, and clothes pins. They used a real mini pumpkin to test how strong their gate was. Didn't hold up? No problem for these engineers! They just revised and rebuilt!
Mrs. O's Class, to see your child's video explanation, click the Flipgrid button and sign in using your child's initials as the password!
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