In other labs, grades K-2 have been building towers out of crayons and musical instruments our of household materials. Be sure to check out this video I made of a special song I wrote just for our youngest students, using instruments I made. Third graders are putting together contraptions using what they’ve learned about seesaws, pulleys and pendulums, Fourth graders are nearing the end of Earth Science, and made a scale-model timeline of the earth, in addition to their volcanoes. Fifth graders are making rovers, like the one NASA recently landed on Mars. They need to launch them, land them without crashing, and make them travel around, using what they learned recently from making rockets, parachutes and helicopters. Sixth graders are solving a real-world problem: they have to design and build an incubator, using what they’ve learned about chemical reactions, to protect some eggs that were found near a nature center parking lot. Thank you to the director of the Tenafly Nature Center (where I once worked as an environmental educator) for calling me to describe the problem.
Speaking of Mars, check out this game that teaches kids to code while they send a rover around the surface of Mars to collect samples. Maybe the next generation of space scientists and engineers will come from OPS!