Silent Hallway Drag Race

We are nearing the end of our Motion and Design unit.  In our unit we have learned many different ways that a vehicle is capable of moving.  Our most current way to have a vehicle move from point A to point B is using a propulsion unit...in this case a rubber band wound around a free spinning axle, while the other end is attached to a fixed axle sent our vehicles flying.  To put our vehicles into action, and for a little competition, we had a "Silent Drag Race" in our hallway.  The car that traveled the shortest distance was eliminated from competition until only one car remained.  Check out our race:

Motion and Design with Google Spreadsheet

Our current science curriculum is "Motion and Design" through the Einstein Project.  In this kit our students get hands on experience learning about how and why vehicles move the way they do.  We spend time learning about Newton's Three Laws of Motion as well.  

This year I have been trying to incorporate more Google Drive tools, especially when opportunities arise to use Google Spreadsheet.  In our most recent lesson, students had to learn how an unbalanced force effected their vehicles' movement.  In this case, the unbalanced force was washers.  At first, their vehicles did not move with small amounts of washers, but eventually, as you will see below, they got their vehicles moving very fast.  The faster their vehicles went in combination with the washers hitting the ground, made actually seeing inertia (vehicle moving without a force acting on it) possible.  

While students made these observations, they also collected data on a Google Spreadsheet.  The spreadsheets were simple, three column, designs.  With their data, students quickly created graphs showing their results with basically one click of a button.  This was a fun, simple, and quick way to collect and analyze data in our fifth grade classroom.

Motion and Design: Wind Powered Cars Challenge

Today in science our students had the task of creating wind powered cars, which was perfect since we had a nice wind blowing (from time to time).  They had about 20 minutes to design and test their vehicles.  We had a couple races afterward for the fun of it.  Luckily, one of our students used an iPad during the building, testing, and racing to capture some photos and videos.  Afterward she created the following movie using iMovie.  Check out our fun, in the sun (and wind), science lesson:

How To's with iMovie

Today we began the final portion of our "How To" writing projects.  Students will be creating an iMovie using an iPad which both tells and shows how to create a simple car they regularly use in their Motion and Design science unit.

This morning we began with one of our students, on the spot and with no preparation  teaching her classmates (and MOSTLY her teachers) "HOW TO" use iMovie.  After she taught how to use the trailer portion of iMovie, as a class we decided that the project portion might work better.  On a side note, more times than not, this on the spot teaching by peers offers SO MANY additional benefits to the classroom.  Why don't we do this more!?  Check out our teacher in training below:

Then, with very little instruction, we sent our groups off to work, using our set of seven iPads.  In just 25 minutes students created quick plans of action and began working.  Even better, after LEAP they were begging to keep working.  This time of year, there is no point in slamming on the breaks when a school writing/technology project has momentum!  Check out what this looks like for most of our students (the Chromebooks were used to look at original written directions on a Google Doc):