STEAM club spent the last few sessions of the 14-15 school year working on a STEAM club Float. The first session students designed their own float. The 2nd session we learned we could be in the Memorial Day Parade, but they had specific rules we had to follow. Those rules changed our design plans. ( A great lesson about the design process.) In the 2nd session we changed our plans to match the Memorial Day Parade Rules.
In the 3rd session we painted the sides of our float. Great pictures of students Painting
In the 4th session we built the structure of our float. Yes, those are power tools the 2nd-5th graders are using. Fortunately, save one splinter we had no injuries. ( Everyone wore protective googles and gloves when we did this at school)
Due to timing constraints I had to put the sides on the float myself, but I hope the kids see how they easily screwed into the structure they had built. Please do take many pictures during the Parade, and we’ll add them to the site!
*Another great Design process item were our wheels. Originally we put 4 strait axle wheels on the float. That made it very hard to turn. I changed the front 2 wheels to caster wheels, which helps the float turn Much easier. This was part of my design process learning, but an important message will show the students at the Parade.)
**Post Parade Note: The caster wheels might have been great driving around the neighborhood, but going over railroad tracks destroyed one of them. Fortunately I had kept a strait axle wheel as a spare, and got it fixed in time to keep us in the parade.
Below the pictures are links to the common core standards we covered in this project.
*Please contact steve@rubberbandproject if you our your school district are interested in learning more about this project.
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