STEAM

Bring out the rockets – It’s S.T.E.A.M. Night!

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

This will be our 7th annual STEM (or S.T.E.A.M.) event, and it seems like a perfect year to focus on rockets.

Paper, air-propelled rockets, slingshot rockets, and even those that soar nearly 300 feet. Students have already begun designing and building their entries for the competition. Rubber bands create great kinetic energy!

We will have several related S.T.E.A.M. activities:

The Date:  30th April, 2018
Place:       Salt River Elementary
Time:         5 – 7 pm

 

 

 

Build a ‘Steady-hand Game’ for under $3

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Here’s the device I constructed from mostly scrap material. It’s been called the ‘steady-hand game.’ The goal in this challenge is for the player to not to complete the circuit!

If any part of the metal wand touches the wire, it completes the circuit, which is connected to a rudimentary ‘fan’. Took me about 45 minutes to assemble the contraption.

I admit, the challenge was a tad too difficult. I could have made it easier, but it tends to be more fun if it triggers the fan. Perhaps for a younger group I could have straightened the wire, or bent back the metal ‘wings’.

Material: wood, scrap wire, duct tape, old plastic container, 9-volt battery, copper wire.

  • The Wand: Metal egg beater from the Dollar Store. Bend back some of the loops to create wing-like protrusions.
  • Fan: Made from an old CD, with a piece of Duct tape to cover the center hole. Pierce the tape with the top of the motor. Connect the positive and negative terminals of the motor to the battery
  • The motor. Available at any hobby store, Radio Shack, or online
  • Battery: Ideally a 9-volt battery. D-size battery will also work fine.

Expand the idea! While this is a great way to incorporate it into a unit about electricity and circuits, you could get some students to design an elaborate set up: More complex coils of wire, different size wands, and different circuits that set off off a bell, a light bulb, a buzzer, and a fan, depending on which circuit the wand touches.

‘Electric Avenue’ lights up STEAM Night at Salt River Elementary

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

This year’s theme gave us plenty space for creativity at our 5th annual STEAM Night celebrating science, technology, engineering, art and math at our school.

The cross-streets of Electric Avenue were filled with parents and children engaged in activities from ‘art bots’ to solar power; from unusual ‘machines’ to circuits. Then there were the bridge builders! The competition this year was to build a bridge with no more than 50 Popsicle sticks. The structure had to carry a load of up to 10 pounds.

  • Students could not use: Metal, plastic, wood, nails, screws, super glue, staples or string.
  • They could use: Paper, Elmers glue, a glue gun, and 4 clothespins

As you will see design, and not just heavier or more expensive material, is key. A big thank you all the teachers and support staff who participated. Also to three organizations I had invited:

Montessori International School – Brown Road campus. Students and their science teacher, Scott Logan had an interactive table display of batteries (the fruit kind!), motors built with copper wire and a battery. They also brought a student-made ‘Electric House’ designed just for this event. It was a cardboard cutout with working models of home appliances that could be operated via a series of switches.

HeatSync Labs – Mesa, Arizona. Eric Ose brought something that required a hands-on effort of many students to make the device work. It was a cutout of Saturn, and students were given a soldering iron with which they had to connect a string of individual LEDs, to the ring of Saturn.

By the end of the evening, we could light up the ring, taking Electric Avenue to a different level! HeatSync Labs, a Maker Space run by volunteers, is definitely worth a visit. I took my robotics team there a few years back.

Martin Art Center. Martin Wesolowski and his wife displayed a Chaldni Plate. Martin runs a hands-on STEM center in Glendale Arizona. The experiment was about using sound waves to create artistic patterns when particles on the plate (salt, typically) resonate.

My ‘Specials’ team manned a  ‘MakerSpace’ table on circuits, batteries and motors. I even built something I had wanted to do for a long time – build the so-called ‘Steady-hand Game’. This used to be a staple game of skill in our youth.  The concept being, a wand that you had to move along a twisted wire, without touching it and completing the circuit.

Below is an art project that glowed under a black light, and some of the bridge entries.

 

When Microsoft ‘draws’ as good as a Sharpie

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

When I tell students that Word or PowerPoint is a versatile tool, and not just for typing of creating slides, I never know what to expect. Such as how some of them have mastered the ‘Curve’ tool in the Shapes menu.

Here’s one. Looks like a pen-and-ink sketch, doesn’t it?

goku_student_drawing2

 

It gets better! Because this is about animating.  The student’s storyboard in PowerPoint  just kept growing!
goku_student_drawing    
goku_student_drawing3

goku_student_drawing4

Robotics 2016 challenge guessing game begins

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Each year, as we wait for details of the FLL Robotics challenge, some teams begin speculating what the specific challenges might be on the tournament table.

FLL had announced the theme, ANIMAL ALLIES. If we were to look into the crystal ball, there could be ‘missions’ around animal rescues, conservation and human-animal bonding.

Previous themes have been: Conservation, Education, Health, Ageing populations, Food, and Catastrophic Events.

Animals will certainly fire up elementary school students, especially in the research project. As for the missions, here is how one team speculates what the table-top missions could be, with detailed builds!

AS the FLL puts it, ANIMAL ALLIES season will be all about young people collaborating to solve a real-world problems. That’s the part I like about the FLL. It creates a rich, evolving context for students who could see bots as part of society they inherit and –most importantly, will influence.

Creating an eBook from a PDF – Cool tool!

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I am testing a book creation tool called YouBlisher. The goal is to learn how it works so I could teach my students next year how to ‘publish’ in more ways than one! Test it out and let me know what you think.

Click on the icon to view a digital book that lets you flip pages. Then read below the pros and cons:

eBook Experiment - YouBlisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s good about Youblisher:

  1. It’s free, so I don’t have to download any software.
  2. The content has to be created on a local computer, and not on the provider’s website.
  3. You need to convert your document into a PDF to upload it. Which means you create your book as a Microsoft Word doc, or Publisher. Alternatively, you could create a photo book using Photoshop or Powerpoint. As long as you save it as a PDF.
  4. The pages flip like a professional ebook.
  5. YouBlisher gives you a link to embed (which is not what I did here – I just linked an image of the cover, back to the site.) They also give you a Facebook embed code.

What I wish was possible:

  • A way to download the entire ebook, and save it on any device
  • A custom URL would be terrific! Right now it’s www.youblisher.com/p/1391665-Full-STEAM-Ahead. But hey!
  • I wish the links within the content worked. There may be a way to fix this…

Note: The content for this eBook was culled from several posts on this blog. It took me just 20 minutes.

Google’s ‘Expedition’ project visits Arizona

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

So I’ve got ‘Google Cardboard’glasses ready, and I’m excited to hear that Google will be here in Arizona this week. It’s part of their roll out of Google Expeditions – a classroom project using virtual reality. A few weeks back I applied to have them come out and run VR sessions, so –fingers crossed — I’m hoping my school gets picked.

So what’s Google Expeditions? There’s a good explanation here on this EdTech site, EdSurge. The Google team is visiting selected schools in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Singapore and Denmark. Each school will get an Expeditions kit – probably a VR ‘Cardboard’ headset, and apps. I noticed that the ‘expeditions’ feature a wide range of topics from ancient civilizations and rain forests, to space and historical events.

Think of it Expeditions as a virtual field trip, or more appropriately, an immersive experience that you could not get out of a text book – something I touched on in the recent Sri Lanka STEAM workshops for teachers.

STEM Student Ambassdors to visit Sri Lanka

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

STEM Ambassadors - Salt River Elementary 2Two students from my school district have been invited to visit Sri Lanka as ‘STEAM Ambassadors‘ in December.

They will represent the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community at two workshops for teachers on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. The workshops will be held in Colombo and Kandy.

The students are:

  • Dominique Grey, a sixth-grade student at Salt River Elementary.
  • Haley Smith, a seventh-grade student at Salt River High School.
  • Maria Chavez, the school’s Parent/Community Involvement Specialist, will accompany them, as well as one parent of each of the students.

Listen to the story here, on KJZZ.