This week in STEM club the girls, in true engineer form, continued thier pigeon parachutes by adding some modifications. They spent the first few minutes perfecting their parachutes and testing them out.
This was the perfect opportunity to talk about the word drag. The girls learned that drag is air resistance. They know the more drag you have against your parachute, the safer your pigeon will land.
Margo explained the concept with this picture.
We sent our new parachutes down the 3 story bell tower once again and,to our surprise, all the girl ‘s pigeon flights improved! They all floated to safety at a slower pace.
The flights took on average 6 seconds to our record high of 8.3 seconds (Elizabeth’s parachute) the girls went back to the classroom and calculated the difference in thier times. They knew to subtract to find the difference and that would tell them how many seconds thier parachute improved by. For many of them the concept of subtracting with decimals was new to them. Math is fun when you are doing pigeon math!
We ended our time with an open Lego time. Way to go girls!
Recent Comments