My Space Rocket for STEM

Children are curious and they begin to know and perceive the world at an early age. From the moment they are born, they tend to explore the environment by observing. In the “concrete operations” period, children tend to learn information with the help of materials. The information of children that learned through material becomes more pernament and open to discuss so that’s why we designed a rocket from bottle that will work with water to help our students to improve the interest that they have about space in our eTwinning project “STEM in Space”.

Materials that we used to make our rocket:

Plastic bottle, cork stopper, thick cardboard, bicycle pump, water, scissors, glue, relief valve.

How did we do our rocket:

First, we cut a conical cap and glued it as the tip of our plastik bottle and we made support legs from thick cardboard because our bottle was upside down. Then, we placed the relief valve in the cork stopper in such a way that water does not leak into the mouth of the bottle. Moreover, we put about a quarter of the water in the bottle. After that, we pumped air into the bottle with a bicycle pump. The plastic bottle jumped upwards in ten seconds.

To sum up, as we are awere of the importance of using materials during education period and we want to raise the interest of our students in STEM in Space topic, we desinged a rocket that can work with gas pressure. We hope it will be useful for my fellow colleagues and their dear students. I wish you an education life which is full of material learning eduation and of course space interest.

See you in another contents.

You can access the video of this event taken in our school from the link below. https://youtube.com/shorts/H9Jk3BupS7A?feature=share

Snowflake Crystals

This activity shadows the eTwinning Project entitled “Adventures of Atmosphere” which was founded with the teachers from Turkey and Italy including Sakine Rüzgar, Enise Ulu Çoğalan, Yıldız Kanlıöz and Eleonora Burnete.

The aim of the project is to engage our students with understanding the atmostpheric events such as snow, rain, hailing, wind or tornado with this STEM challenge.

Age of students: 9-12.

Time: 30’+30’+30’+20

Activity date : Between 12th-16th of April ,2021

Abstracts

Teachers will conduct preliminary investigations in order to help the students in terms of gaining knowledge on cloud formation, snowflake crystals and the role of clouds in the growth of snowflake crystals. Additionally, they will also help them how to explore TRMM images and data; and the role clouds play in the Earth’s radiant budget and climate.

What is Snowflake ?

When people say snowflake, they often mean snow crystal. The latter is a single crystal of ice, within which the water molecules are all lined up in a precise hexagonal array. Snow crystals display that characteristic six-fold symmetry

Objectives

  1. Being creative to solve a problem,
  2. Knowing how to clearly express their thoughts in an organized way,
  3. Learning how a snowflake grow up in the clouds,
  4. Giving students the opportunity to learn about the fact via snowflakes simulation and hands-on learning
  5. Developing science skills like observation, classification, measurement
  6. Improving foreign language skills.
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Tornado in a Jar

TORNADO IN A JAR

In our eTwinning Project Adventures of Atmosphere, our aim is to make meteorological observations using the basic methods used by meteorology, data collection, evaluation, analysis and synthesis. Pupils get to know atmospheric events and precipitation types, evaluate and interpret them by absorbing their formation processes and characteristics. They will develop creative and critical thinking skills, learn by trial and error, develop research and invention skills, and increase problem-solving skills based on the STEAM approach, focusing on science, mathematics, engineering and arts.

With this project, project partner teachers will learn to make an interdisciplinary STEM plan in accordance with the curriculum-integrated (gain-oriented) 5E model.

In our lessons, project partners will learn how to plan, design products, and apply STEM plans. With STEM studies, pupils will gain the skills of collaboration, teamwork, inquiry, research, critical thinking, solving daily life problems and analyzing with 21st-century skills.

The image is the author’s own –(Attribution CC-BY)
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Intellegence Games With Waste Materials

In the eTwinning project ‘Meeting STEM’, we designed intelligence games from waste materials with our students. Our students have designed games that will enable them to develop by having fun while protecting the environment. They designed and made games such as pentagon, mangala, word game and reversi from used materials such as bottle caps, cardboard and paper.

The image is the author’s own –(Attribution CC-BY)

Why is recycling important to our environment?

With recycling, we protect both nature and our resources. We can use our natural resources such as water, forest, mines and oil, which are consumed more and more every day, by recycling, for a longer period of time. By recycling recyclable wastes, we can obtain new products without consuming our natural resources. For example, by recycling a ton of paper, 17 trees can be prevented from being cut down. As a result of the recycling of plastic packaging waste, oil savings can be achieved. For every ton of glass transformed, 100 litres of oil is saved. By recycling metal packaging and wooden packaging, we can protect our natural spaces intact.

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STEM Education vs Traditional Education

Author: Alketa Barjami

For the 2020 STEM Discovery Campaign, I organised few activities. They are listed and described below.

“STEM Education vs Traditional Education”


Type of activity or action: Training session
Date: 20/04/2020 – 24/04/2020

STEM helps to turn new ideas into better education. Timely education during PANDEMIC showed that STEM in home conditions, with the presence of the Internet, brought solutions to online education. Traditional education allows the student to receive formal education and teaches to focus on the topic in question.

Resource: SCIENTIX WEBINAR: QUIRKY IDEAS TO PIQUE AND PROMOTE STUDENT INTEREST IN STEM CLASSROOMS.

For me, it was the first time I designed and implemented a lesson plan on Scientix, but it was not difficult … I could enrich it over time. The difficulty for students was that it was the first time they used online tools to build online puzzles. We could apply it for some more projects this month because we needed to learn online more…

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