Jumping into City

Hi everyone! As with all things at brightworks Blue Band started City by reflecting and asking questions. Here are are initial efforts to find the answers!What city is the biggest? How can we find out? Students were given a table of tool options (string, centimeter and inch cubes, rulers and grid paper) and asked to come up with a stategy to find the perimeter and area of cities they were curious about. We ran into the challenges of using difficult scales and keeping track of lots of numbers.How can maps help us answer questions? On the suggestion of another collaborator we tried to solve the famous Bridges of Koenigsberg problem: how can we walk across all seven bridges without going over any bridge more then once? The students eventually realized the task was impossible, but they concluded finding out we can't do something is just as interesting as discovering we can, even when it feels really frustrating. It was also a fun challenge in creative map making using different materials.Where does water go?  Students have expressed a lot of interest in water this arc. We started by estimating how much water we got in SF each month on average over the last 5 years. It was a nice chance to evaulate our perceptions and start to think about how we can measure rain. It's also been very rainy this week, so certainly a useful time to think about H2O      We then went on a journey as water and reflected where water goes and how it gets there. We went from animals to the ocean to clouds to moutains to streams and into the ground. On Monday we are going to share the story of our journeys with yellow band who has also been exploring water in our city.  Our latest exploration was wondering about how water can change along it's journey and what it can pick up along it's way. We gathered a collection of our favorite liquids and learned how to find their pH.