Montgomery second graders were very fortunate to have Mariah Keagy from Vermont Energy Education Program come in to do some STEM with them! The students were engineers who designed, tested, and revised sail designs. The engineering design question was: What should engineers consider when designing a sail on a boat? Students explored materials and their properties and predicted which materials would work best for their sail design. Students then built and tested their design using a large fan and track attached between two tables. If students were successful in sailing their boat across the track, they then kept data on the time, and headed back to the drawing board to revise their ship to improve the sail time. If a student’s boat did not make it across the track, they revised the boat to find more success. In order to receive more materials throughout the initial building and revision process, students needed to make a claim. For example, a student might have said, “My boat will go faster if I double the size of my sail, so I need more paper,” or “My sail was floppy! I need another popsicle stick to make it stronger.”
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