Year 7 STEM
The Rube Goldberg Challenge – by Jess Stargatt, Year 7 student
My Peers and I worked in groups of 3 to make our very own Rube Goldberg machine. Simply, a Rube Goldberg Machine is a complicated contraption to do a simple task. Some of the things groups did were as simple as recycling a water bottle all the way to completing a circuit to turn on a light bulb. We all experienced challenges but overcame these by using our teamwork, in the end we got our machines to work and had a lot of fun along the way.
What’s my Story Challenge – by India Holland, Year 8 Leader
We had to figure out what animal we were looking at, using a small piece of evidence, like a skeleton or photo. We used the features of the organism, like the size and measurements of the skeleton or shape of beaks and research to work out what the species was and then we could construct a food web to show what it eats and what eats it.
Year 8 STEM
Automated Vehicle Challenge – by Tynan Wain, Year 8 STEM leader:
The challenge was to make a Lego EV3 robot act like an automated vehicle and drive through the streets of our map from point A to B that we selected. We worked in groups of 2-3 to solve the problem. We W programmed the Lego EV3 to go around the course and not crash. The hardest part of the programming was the turns but we solved it by trial and error. Automated Vehicles could be good, but they could pose a big safety risk to our society because the programming is really difficult to get right.
Investigating Cells – by Lara Myhill Year 8 STEM Leader:
We learned about cells – what they do, the different types and the names of parts of a cell. For one of our investigations we used a swab to collect cheek cells from inside our mouth and put them on a Microscope slide, and then we stained them with blue stain, covered with thin glass, and observed all of the tiny cells.