Another blog entry from John Sokol:
Before vacation our eighth-grade students partook in a fun holiday STEM challenge. Students were tasked with designing and building a tree and a snowball launcher. Their goals were: (1) design and build a catapult with an amount of force capable of knocking over another group’s tree from a distance of 3 meters and (2) design and build a freestanding tree able to withstand the snowballs being launched at it. The only materials available to each group were a plastic spoon, popsicle sticks, elastic bands, construction paper, toilet paper rolls, cups, tape, scissors, and glue. Students were applying knowledge of the engineering process and experimenting with physics. See below for visuals.
