I love hands-on activities, kids love hands-on activities, let’s do hands-on activities.  Carolina STEM Challenge Boats and Buoyancy Kit provides everything needed to conduct a week’s worth of hands-on STEM activities providing students with concrete examples of the affects of density.

Students are challenged to create boats with three different products, foil, craft sticks and clay that will float in water and likely SINK when the load stress of pennies is added.  Of vital importance as with any lesson is planning.  Teachers must familiarize themselves with the three design challenges completely before embarking.

After introduction, students were task with writing a question with a hypothesis of what type of boat would hold the most pennies before sinking.  Carolina has included grading rubrics, warm up activities and design challenge worksheets to accompany.  Extension activities of reading and writing could be easily included in the activities to create an entire unit memorable to students.

It became apparent that students MUST be reminded of time limitations because they want to create elaborate boats!  Our little engineers created sleek simple structures and some that we weren’t quite sure would make it through the first phase of simply floating without any stress.

FOIL

Perhaps the easiest yet the most difficult at the same time because foil tears so easily.  Most every team destroyed the first attempt at a float-able structure 🙂

Craft Sticks

These students build a wave guard….although they understood no waves were going to occur in our controlled environment.  Their reasoning was placing the vessel in the water the first time would prevent water from “accidentally” washing over the sides due to the difficulty of placing the vessel in the water completely level.

CLAY

Every single clay boat SUNK the first time because of tiny holes in the structure.  At one point, students were provided with a lamp to see if any light was penetrating the vessel.

We completed a different design challenge with the various materials each day.  Students were very excited, conducting experiments at home each evening trying to build the vessel that would hold the most pennies.  The excitement of our unit extended to brothers and sisters.  We’re contemplating a school wide competition!

Ordering the Carolina STEM Challenge Boats and Buoyancy Kit ensures that every experiment conducted contains the exact same products guaranteeing results that can be graphed and graded on the same scale.

Are you ready to conduct your own Boats and Buoyancy experiments?

Giveaway Requirements:

• Must be a currently employed K-12 classroom teacher
• Enter on behalf of a teacher and we’ll ship the prize to the teacher’s school address.
• Ends Dec 11, 2014 at 11:59pm ET
• Enter DAILY for more chances
• Must not have won a Penniless Teacher giveaway in the past 60 days
• Complete ALL mandatory requirements

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