New Albany Collaboratory

We’ve had a lot of engineering developments in the Collaboratory in the last week and a half!
* Kindergartners finished their Pushes and Pulls unit and experimented with a marble run, discussing how gravity and friction played a role in the speed of the marble.
* First Graders learned about pollination and worked on the ASK phase of the Engineering Design Process by testing different materials that will later be used in their hand pollinators.
* Second Graders also worked on the ASK phase by combining materials to see how they changed. They will use this information to IMAGINE and PLAN out their play dough process.

Kindergartners explored the effects of friction using ramps with different surfaces and comparing the speed of tennis balls and marbles.

Second graders took a quiz to see which of five engineering careers best suit their interests. Check out our future Computer Scientists, Biomedical Engineers, Agricultural Engineers, Acoustical Engineers, and Aerospace Engineers! 👩‍🔬 🌎 👩‍🚀 🎤 💻

Kindergarteners have been exploring pushes, pulls, force and motion. Last week, students created safe slides with pool noodles to show how gravity pulls the marble down the slide and how to make the marble change directions

More coding Olympic challenges in 2nd grade!

Each grade level has now completed their first coding Olympic challenge.
K/T1: Short Course Speedskating
1: Ice Hockey
2: Long Course Speedskating

At the midway point, Team Antarctica (purple) is in first place, Team Asia (yellow) is in second place, and Team South America (red) is in the third place. The remaining continents are not far behind! Second challenges have begun and we should be completed by midweek next week. Great job coders!

Students are doing an amazing job with their Olympic coding challenges. 🏅 🏒 ⛸️ 🌎

Second graders practicing with Dash and Kindergartners starting their first Olympic challenge - speed skating! ⛸️ 🥇

Second graders started to learn about stop motion animation this week. They worked hard to make animations with group members names and are looking forward to making Halloween animations next week! A few practice animations are in the comments!

Kindergartners imagined, planned, created and improved to build Forky just like Bonnie did in Toy Story!

Celebrating International Dot Day with ”dot” pixel art and using augmented reality to make our dots come to life! We showed our courage to try new things and used creativity in our designs.

Second graders loved learning about circuits and then working with Snap Circuits to build a music box, similar to how music plays in infant or toddler toys. They were so excited when they correctly completed their circuit and their speaker played “Happy Birthday!”

After completing the music box, many groups started working on the motion detector. We will finish out the year with a few other circuits!

Last week’s challenge involved taking all that we’ve learned about strong structures and building towers made of index cards to see which class could build the tallest tower! Mrs. DeBarberie’s class built the tallest tower of all of the classes at over 3 feet tall!

Students explored what made structures strong first on a piece of paper and then put their ideas to the test when they used the earthquake simulator.

Successful pollinators 🐝 🌸

Last week, second graders took a quiz to see which type of engineering job matched most closely with their interests and preferences. Students were matched with and learned about: *Acoustical Engineers
*Aerospace Engineers
*Agricultural Engineers
*Biomedical Engineers
*Computer Scientists

Our upcoming engineering unit will focus on Chemical Engineers!

Testing materials and planning our pollinator designs 🌸 🌹 🌺

We completed our literacy component to our pollinator unit this week and groups did research about bees for “Can you bee-lieve?” hallway display.

Did you know…
🐝 Approximately in every three bites of food depends on bees for pollination
🐝 Honeybees do the “waggle dance” to communicate to other bees where to find the best source of food
🐝 There are over 20,000 species of bees that contribute to pollination

We are going to use the Engineering Design Process to plan and create our own handmade pollinators in the coming weeks! 🌸 🌹 🌺

Almost at the end of our pushes and pulls unit, students got to explore all aspects of force and motion this week with this awesome wooden marble run gifted to us by one of our Kindergarten families! We had so much fun!

This week, first graders learned all about pollination - why plants and insects both need one another, how a plant makes seeds, and how pollinators’ different mouth structures allow them to pollinate different kinds of flowers. This experiment allowed students to explore how plants get pollinated by insects. 🐝 🌸 🦋 🌺

Kindergarten and T1 students explored friction with ramps this week. Students found the ramp colors with the most and least friction for three different objects: tennis balls, marbles, and toy cars. Students practiced recording their observations just like scientists!

A glimpse into our Pushes and Pulls Science/Engineering unit