BUILDING SCIENCE – Summer Science Day 5

This is such a fun day because it closely relates to STEM!  We start off making marshmallow shooters. I’m lucky to have 2 helpers (my mom! and a cadet teacher) to help students and this really makes this go more smoothly.  Cutting the cups and attaching the balloons can be tricky so it is good to have adult help.  

We follow STRICT only shoot when I tell you and NEVER at anyone or it goes straight to me or in the backpack no questions!   I ended up only making about 10 of these and we took turns shooting.  I always make with SOLO cups and the number on the bottom indicates the type of plastic used and 2 defintiely did not work as well as #6s did.  Alas trial and error in the science world. 

don’t mind that we are shooting in our old woodshop – our gym was in use and outside was raining

Marshmallow bridges with toothpicks and marshmallows in a certain amount of time.  We can use paper and test strength as well.  Definitely a challenge as I made the requirements pretty difficult.  The students had a blast and really worked well on teams for this!  They worked so well together and used different strategies to come up with the strongest bridge. 

Next we did foil boats and looked in groups to help figure out what shape would best hold the most weight.  We tested ours with pennies. 

Most of the experiments again are from this resource I created below.  Feel FREE to grab this FREE resource and leave me some feedback.