Premise
Working against a Criteria & Constraints List individually or with partners, students build an apple-balancing device to be worn on their heads and test in a relay race. This challenge is perfect for studies of gravity, forces & motion! As with all the challenges in this series, materials are the symbols of the season: school supplies and apples!
Where Can I Find Out More?
If you're familiar with my work, you know I've been switching over to using video to explain the bulk of my challenges. It seems to be the best/fastest way to explain the important details: materials, set-up, tips, modifications, extensions, demonstrations, and more! Who has time to read all that?! However, if you do prefer to read it, you'll find the video transcribed at the end of this post. :)
Check out the video below to see Apples A-head in action:
Other BTS STEM Challenges:
Resources
This challenge has a print-friendly resource (left) and a digital resource for use with Google Slides (right).Apples A-head is one of the five challenges in the Back-to-School STEM Challenge Bundle.
And if that's not enough, you can find even more STEM challenges in my Mega Bundle, on this blog, and on my YouTube channel!
Please reach out with any questions and tag me in photos of your students' work on Facebook & Instagram.PIN ME
Video Transcription
Welcome to Part 5 of 5. It’s our last
Back-to-School STEM Challenge. This is Challenge 5 of 5. It is called Apples
A-head. Let’s take a closer look at the materials, and I’ll be right back.
This is the STEM Challenge Cycle you should
follow for every challenge. I’ll define each step in another video. I’ve added
a pop-in cart to that video here, as well as a link in the description.
You might be familiar with some of my STEM
challenges. I love to combine a STEM challenge with a little bit of PE, and
this is one such challenge. The students are going to be making an
apple-balancing device that they can wear on their heads, and they can use it
to compete in a relay race. It has elements of STEM, elements of PE, and
elements of strategy involved.
Criteria and constraints are pretty simple on
this. The students need to all make their own headwear. It needs to keep the
apple balanced on top of their heads, as they compete in the relay race, and
it’s got to be easy to take the apple in and out of their devices so they can
transfer them quickly. For the constraints, you have that the students may not
touch the device or apple during the race, except during transfers.
If you have younger students and you want to
make the race a little bit easier, I’ll allow them to actually touch the
device, but not the apple. I also use smaller apples with younger students to
make things a little easier. The students are not allowed to fully cover the
apple. It must always remain visible.
If you have older students, you might
actually want to increase the difficulty so, in that case, you use larger
apples. Require that students make devices that allow them to balance two or
more apples on their head at a time. You can require that every student in
their group create a unique design, so no doubling up within the same group.
You can definitely keep that constraint that students are not allowed to touch
the apple or the device during the race, except during transfers to teammates.
Each student and team should make his or her
own headwear. That way, they don’t have to transfer the headwear, and you don’t
have to worry about having a lice fiasco during your first couple of weeks of
school. Nobody wants that.
By now, you might be wondering, “Is she going
to wear that the entire time she talks?” Yes, she is going to wear this the
entire time she talks.
One of the things you want to do for a setup
is you want to think about where you can hold the relay race, so make sure that
you have that in mind. You’re going to need either cones, or you can use
chairs, so that at the far end of the relay course, students will have
something they can walk around.
You also want to think about what is the mode
of the relay race. Are you having students just walk the course, which is
probably recommended and it’s hard to go much faster with an apple on your
head. But you might want to throw in some obstacles, like they have to turn
around in a circle, or they have to hula-hoop, or squat, or jump, or whatever.
I recommend making sure that each group has
its own timer, so I’ll let students use their cellphones if they have them for
that. It just makes it easier on you as the teacher not to have to call out
times and figure out who was first and all that. You want to be able to have
each group know what their own time is because, when they do a second
iteration, which hopefully they will, you don’t have to on this one. It’s a
little bit lighter, but it is fun to see how you can improve your time by
improving your designs, but also by improving your teamwork and your strategy.
The reason you want to have the students have
their timers is, rather than determining their success based on, “Oh, our team
came in first place," or "Our team came in third place,” it’s better
to use your time, it’s more concrete, so the time it takes you to complete the
relay course for each race. That way, you can compare over time how you’ve
improved.
Again, you want to take a look, for your
cross-curricular connections ...
If you want to save yourself some time and
some prep work, take a look at the actual resource.
This resource contains everything you need,
including modifications for use for second through eighth-graders. You’ll still
need to gather the simple materials, of course, but the rest has been done for
you. You’ll get aligned Next Gen Science Standards for Engineering and Physical
science, links to my STEM challenge How-To videos to help you get the most from
each challenge and the Apples A-head Materials List.
In Teacher Tips, you’ll find premise and
set-up, how to increase or decrease difficulty through the Criteria and
Constraints list, directions for running the relay race, measuring results and
cross-curricular extension suggestions, including links to videos and articles
to help you and your students understand more about Newton’s Laws of Motion.
You’ll find an editable Criteria and
Constraints list. You can tailor the challenge to your students.
For Student Handouts, there are two versions.
Four-page expanded room for response for younger students and a two-page
condensed space paper-saver version. You’ll also find a set of group discussion
questions.
In the Extension Handouts, you’ll find two
Apple writing templates, as well as map extension and process flow templates.
This resource is available individually and is part of the discounted
Back-to-School and Mega STEM Challenge bundles.
For one-to-one paperless classrooms, a
version for use with Google slides is coming soon. Links can be found in the
description below the video.
I really enjoyed putting seasonal STEM
challenges together and if you want to see more like it, take a look in the
links in the description below for my store, and you can see the 44 challenges
I’ve put together so far, most of which are seasonal, but not all, and there’s
a freebie in there, too.
Make sure that you like and subscribe. I will
be back next week, but I’m not telling you with what yet, so I’ll see you then.
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