I will try to use the class blog now to keep us all in touch and help share our learning whilst we are all at home.
Thank you to all the pupils who have shared photos with me so far and keep them coming.
Aatish has shared his solution for the Countdown problem
as well as Jamie who shared this one.
Lucy also shared a photo of her STEM activity and showed her ingenuity substituting the cork with some orange peel following Lewis’ great tip.
Today, we created our own Tangram or as they are sometimes called Chinese Square Puzzle.
Tangrams are a great way to develop spatial awareness as well as knowledge about 2D shapes.
Tonight we held our STEM Showcase.
This is P623’s chance to show family and friends all the STEM work we have been doing in class all year.
Today, we designed and constructed a Mars lander module that would safely deliver a payload to the surface of the planet.
We were given a design brief and a budget of £100,00,000! Our briefing stated that dropping a manned module on the Red Planet is the equivalent of dropping an egg from a height of 4 metres.
After a first test and any modifications, we finally dropped our eggs.
Well done to the winning team that successfully dropped their lander without any damage to their egg.
Following on from our Animal Adaptation lessons, we explored the benefits of having a layer of blubber to surviving Arctic Ocean temperatures of between -2 and 0 oC.
The Blubber Glove experiment involves first timing how long you can keep your hand in cold (2.4 oC) water.
Most people can only tolerate this for less than a minute.
Secondly, we covered our hand in lard to replicate a layer of blubber.
Again, we put our hands in the water and time it again.
Finally, we used our results to create a spreadsheet and create a chart to show our results.
This afternoon, Mr Hull visited us to demonstrate the app Bloxels which is used to create our own games.
Today we had two visitor assemblies, the first from Matthew who is building a cob oven for Mearns Primary school. This is an oven made of clay that has been used for thousands of years.
Our second visitors were the authors of a the book The Highland Falcon Thief, M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman. The book is about a boy detective called Harrison (Hal) and in each book he solves a mystery on a real-world famous train.
Finally, we concluded our insulation experiment and identified the best and worst insulator and gave reasons why they were so.
Please come along to our STEM Showcase on Thursday 12th March 2020.
After plotting our results from the insulation experiment on a chart, we couldn’t easily decide which material was the best insulator.
As a class we thought it would be better to plot the temperature drop of the water from the start to the end of the experiment.
After sorting our results, we can now see that the material that resulted in the least amount of temperature drop is cotton wool. This means that cotton wool was the best insulator and aluminium foil is the worst insulator.
Initially, we thought aluminium foil would be the best, but because metal is such a good conductor of heat eg. warms up quickly when in contact with heat, it does not keep the water warm. The aluminium foil quickly heats up using the temperature of the water, cooling it down rapidly.
However, cotton wool is full of spaces and gaps that are full of air which is not a good conductor of heat. Therefore, the air does not heat up easily and the heat cannot transfer from the hot water keeping it hotter for longer.
Why doesn’t ice cream melt in a very hot oven?
This week in our Science club we were looking at why we can put ice cream in the oven without it melting. To prove this we made some baked Alaska.
First we made some meringue by whisking up egg white at high speed until they formed stiff peaks. We then place a few scoops of ice cream on top of a slice of cake and completely covered the ice cream.
We then baked it at 220oC (very hot) for 10 minutes. Normally ice cream would melt completely at these sort off temperatures, but when we served it the meringue was hot and the ice cream was still very cold. How is this possible?
When we whisked the egg whites we trapped millions of air bubbles in the mixture. Air is not a good conductor of heat and therefore the meringue mixture acts as an insulator protecting the ice cream from the heat of the oven. This is why fabrics that trap air keep us warm and why igloos provide people with shelter in polar regions.
As well as being a great insulator, meringue tastes great with cake and ice cream.
This morning we attended a P4-7 assembly and had a visit from NSPCC Scotland to tell us about keeping ourselves and our bodies safe. Tomorrow, they will be returning to our classroom for a follow up visit.
In class, we started to analyse our result from yesterday’s insulation experiment and used Google Sheet to create tables and charts.
