Week 6 Reflection

As what feels like of the few science teachers in our district who doesn't teach some sort of STEAM elective class, the whole Engineering Design Process was new to me. Don't get me wrong, I know I've unintentionally used those steps myself when working on projects, but I've never organized my class projects that way. Ultimately there were a number of unknowns going into this for me and a little bit of fear.

Would my students succeed?
How much support should I give them?
What if the teams were not working well together?
What would ultimately happen on competition day?

Thankfully, it all went fine and almost all my groups were successful for the competition day, those that were not may need some more support from me next week as we begin to move onto the next part of the assessment.

Just as an example this is what I provided my students (to note I have 7 classes for a total of 244 students, they worked mostly in groups of 4, so there were about 60 groups)
- Glue guns (we had 3)
- 200 glue gun sticks (almost enough, we ran out on competition day, but repairs could be done with tape)
- Tape (masking and scotch)
- White glue
- 1000 craft sticks (we were out of these by the end of the first day, we could have used a ton more)
- Balloons (2 provided by me per group, though I had extras for the competition in case they needed it)
- Straws (In a variety of sizes, around 1000)

Students also brought in a bunch of stuff on their own to work with, bottle caps, cardboard, old CDs, wooden skewers, and more. Although I provided a lot, something for the axles and wheels would have been necessary for the groups to bring. I do actually have skewers for the axles, but only provided these to groups who were nearing the competition and still at a loss of what to use.

A few of the final cars, I gave extra credit for artistic merit for students who choose to decorate their cars.

We had our actual competition on Thursday, which meant the students had two days for the initial planning and five days for building, this was more than most groups needed, but with the timing I thought it made more sense to draw out the activity than to introduce something new right before the weekend.

For the competition the students took turns having their cars travel along the classroom floor, my classroom is rather long (48 feet for the competition area) so it worked to test in there. If I didn't have that space I probably would have tested in the MPR. 

The students had the requirement of having their car travel at least 5 feet, it was a good metric of determining if the car actually moved or not. 

Just a few of the cars competing.

I did allow a sympathy nudge for the cars that needed a little push to get started (these were cars that were fighting for the 5 feet, not for winning furthest distance). 

For the students whose cars didn't work, they will continue working (with my help if needed) and we will be testing next week (aiming for the five feet). This is the first part of the assessment and I want all students to be successful in it, I am willing to help them with ideas and problem solving if needed. For the rest of the students they should be done with their group Wikiprojects documenting their engineering design process by Monday and will start working on the next task.