Winter Olympics

For the first two STEM lessons of the year, Grade 5-6 students have been working in teams to create a solution to a Winter Olympics design challenge. Students voted on the Winter Olympics theme and the question they chose to tackle was:  How can you use the materials provided to design and build a ski lift chair?

Students decided that the criteria they would use to test and evaluate the success of their designs would be a time-trial/race with the fastest ski chairs being awarded gold, silver and bronze places. As well as needing to be the fastest ski chair, their mini person also needed to stay inside their chair and arrive "safely" at the bottom of the "ski lift".

During our first testing phase one design was very fast!
Gold Medal: 3 seconds
Silver Medal: 23 seconds
Bronze: 27 seconds

We saw some fabulous team work and heard plenty of group discussions about the force of friction and which materials they thought would help to improve their designs.

 

First test: This design was awarded a "gold medal" for taking 3 seconds to travel down