Project STEM Elementary 4+

Harness the incredible power of your iPad or computer. Design impressive handheld gliders that you can easily put together. Create whole squadrons of your very own designs that you can make soar! Have a contest to see who can design and build the best glider.

All you need is our software, along with your iPad, scissors, a metric ruler, card stock and/or balsa wood, a little clay, and a bottle of super glue (for card stock gliders) or a hot glue gun (for balsa wood gliders).

This software is a true designing application that includes authentic glider analyses and predictions. It requires a bit more effort to design and build your own gliders to fly instead of just watching simulations, or using prebuilt designs, but the payoff can be well worth it. By building your own gliders you will quickly learn much more about flight, while likely feeling far more empowered and satisfied seeing your designs glide off into the distance while gaining a great authentic STEM experience.

The software is already a great success at many schools (students 11 years old and up).

The Science Methods Searching for Solutions app, also gives students an impressive authentic experience in how math and measurement can help one solve demanding problems.

This App uses a very fun and engaging activity involving mixing three primary colors to match a given specimen of unknown mixing. The challenge is to find the combination of primary color intensities that make up the target specimen color in as few test tries as possible.

It is a very simple activity; but one that can be made ever more challenging by dialing down the allowable matching error. With the introduction of an error measurement meter and mathematical methods of seeking convergence, this activity also becomes an elegant means of giving students valuable insights and experiences into the application of math to find solutions.

Whereas the natural tendency is to try to solve the mixing using trial and error, with this unit students will discover how ineffective guessing is and how much more successful mathematical methods are at efficiently converging to the solutions.

The unit is structured and carefully differentiated to work over a wide range of abilities, and can be employed to support many learning standards, so that its use can span classrooms from grades 3 to 12 and/or can be used for learning at home.

COLOR THEORY:

Introduce students to color theory and how monitors use primary colors to generate a wide gamut of color hues while having fun doing color matching activities that can be stepped up in challenge level.

SCIENCE METHODS INCLUDE:

Pattern Recognition
Information Modeling
Accuracy and Error Measurement
Systematic Problem Solving
Solution Convergence

SOLUTION STRATEGIES:

Guess
Error Measurement
Bisection
Ratio
Gradient

APP CONTENT:

* Five Computer Simulations of Color Mixing & Problem Solving Methods
* 3-Dimensional Information Modeling
* Simulation of Three Different Experimental Design Scenarios

* Seven classroom activity lessons with objectives
* Three hands-on lab plans with material lists, notes
* Teacher Lesson Answers and Lab Guidance

PROBLEM SOLVING:

At its foundation, this App teaches students how math and science can be used to find experimental solutions; it introduces students to the important ideas and methods of Experimental Design. How do you match the color, to repaint a car that has been damaged, when the original color of the car has faded? How do you mix several color dyes together for an accessory when you wish to match the color of a dress? Experimental Design problems abound in all aspects of life; the question asked often is how much of several known inputs are needed to get the results desired. They will experience how computers are used as a tool to study real world problems and learn solution strategies.

Once you learn convergence strategies, one is likely to score much higher on our related Power Play Color Match game app too.