Continue reading »]]> As I thought about what to do this past week for STEM club, I couldn’t help but want to give the pigeon one last adventure. (The pigeon is carried over from our last week’s book Don’t let the Pigeon Ride the Bus ). The girls settled in to hear about the story and new STEM task that awaited them – the pigeon wanted to drive a race car! The task was to build a car out of legos for the pigeon, but how would it get its power to go fast? Thats when I gave them the idea of a Lego ballon race car. All girls LOVE balloons (more than they love pigeons).

We discussed how to build it and what we had to consider for our design. Once we had an idea, we went downstairs to the Lego table. The girls wanted to get their hands on the balloon, but I wouldn’t allow them until their car was built.

They started to select wheels, and to my surprise, they all started testing what to use in oder to have a hole for the ballon end.

Elizabeth and Olivia went for windows – pretty clever.

The girls today were all about simplicity. Once their lego car was complete (with pigeon attached) they started to do some test runs.

During the test runs they realized – Lego cars are difficult! The balloons did not cooperate and they kept going back to fix their designs.

Out of the 4 Pigeon Balloon cars that raced, only two were successful at even moving. Madison’s went 49 inches and Elizabeths went 8.

Perhaps the pigeon should just stick to driving buses after all!

Continue reading »]]> 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!