balloons
Today our Australian teacher friends (from Mark Oliphant College) engaged the kids in a balloon-based project in between their bands' explorations of motion. The Australian teachers brought in red balloons, paper flaps, tape, and cups to create Gyro Balloons to explore lift and how someone might control a hard-to-control object in the air.The Undead Goats took on the challenge first.
Evan and Isaac worked on piecing together their contraptions.
Ben and Barry examined placement of the wing flaps to catch the air.
They used hair dryers to help their gyroscopes float and spin. Henry seemed to get the motion down.
Connor decided to create a nozzle for the hair dryers after the Undead Goats built several iterations of the gyroscope design. He said, "Don't change the balloon, change the hair dryer."
The Flying Fish, with Dean's help, turned their Gyro Balloons into hovercrafts that floated in the wind stream of the vertical wind tunnel.
Blowing up balloons was a first for many of the Fish.
The Fish were fascinated by the balloons floating in the wind stream and came up with lots of ideas about why they stayed caught in the air, while paper contraptions from earlier in the week flew up into the air and fell quickly to the ground.
Was it that the balloons contained air? Were made out of plastic? Were lighter? They ended up coming to the consensus that it was because the balloons are round.
With Mackenzie, the Fish drew illustrations of air moving around balloons while in the air.
The Ninja Cats worked with Barry to modify the school's rocking horse so that it could move across the floor without removing any pieces from it.
They ended up adding wheels to the front of the rocking horse and used a sharp forward motion of their bodies to propel the horse across the floor.
Barry and the Cats talked about how the horse was able to move using potential force, not kinetic force, when they added the wheels.
Beautiful drawings resulted from the discussion!
Theo taught his fellow Cats a cork floor game.
We said goodbye to Barry, Dean, and David at the end of the day, but we can't wait to start pen-palling and keeping in touch with friends from across the globe!