Adventures In STEM

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Hard to believe these images were taken right after a storm. 

We made Kinetic Sand yesterday.  It was an interesting experiment for us to try.  You need sand, dawn dish soap, water, and corn starch.  You mix them together and wait a couple of hours for the chemical reaction to take place.  Through trial and error we finally got the right substance and were able to play with this sand.  We built a tower.  Now you might be asking what can I use this sand for.  Well you can challenge the students/kids by having them create or engineer structures to see how long they last.  You could link this with a book about Egypt and have the students build a pyramid.  There are several different options for Kinetic Sand.  Let your exploration begin.  Here is the link for the Kinetic Sand:  http://www.growingajeweledrose.com/2015/01/homemade-kinetic-sand.html

The Wizard of OZ and Science. By: Heidi Wunschel How much do you believe in transportation based on the weather?  Can you be transported by a tornado to a different world? These questions have always had me wondering if it was possible like in the Wizard of Oz.  I feel like I should offer you some background information about the movie in case you don’t know what it is about. It is a movie that was created in 1939 by Warner Brothers and it is still a popular movie till this day.  It is about a girl named Dorothy and her little dog. They live in tornado alley. A tornado was coming and she didn’t have time to take cover. The tornado swept her and her dog up and transported them to the Land of Oz. Here is a preview of the movie so that you might get a visualization of the land of oz: Now there are several interesting things that I have noticed about this movie like how it goes from black and white to color, tornadoes causing a girl to end up in an...

I started my blog about STEM but really felt that I needed to do more research in order to fully understand what and how it was created.  I found out that in the early 2000's we in the United States were preforming or achieving at a lower rate then other countries.  This resulted in a push in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematical fields. This resulted in a push for teachers to work on teaching these skills to students.  I found out that it was a struggle at first because there was not really a curriculum for this.  " Six states received grants from the  National Governors Association to pursue three key strategies: (1) to align state K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) standards, assessments, and requirements with post-secondary and workforce expectations; (2) to examine and increase each state’s internal capacity to improve  teaching  and  learning , including the continued development of data systems and new models ...

This afternoon we built this Solar Car. My 9 year old daughter and I worked on it. I read the instructions and she built it.