It was Cardboard Challenge week in CLIC.  5th graders spent the week in CLIC working in groups designing, building, testing, redesigning, and retesting their awesome cardboard projects.  Students had to work together from start to finish creating some of the best games and experiences I have seen yet.  Part of the challenge is to work collaboratively but most of all, it is to successfully create a product that is both entertaining and will work reliably.  Once built, the fifth graders spent the Wednesday morning before vacation sharing their games with the entire school.  Everyone loved trying out the projects!  The projects were a great success. 

CLIC STEAM Clubs are wrapping up an extensive unit on pneumatic and hydraulic powered machines.  Students have been building, testing, and redesigning their machines to first be able to have a component that could be manipulated to move.  Then students had to figure out how to attach the air or water powered syringes in a way that allowed the moving components to work reliably.  
I have seen so much growth in STEAM Club members this month.  Many times these projects are difficult and challenging to build yet get to move.  Students have gained patience and hard working attitudes to successfully work through the engineering process.  Every person is building something unique so they had to work independently for themselves.  It is a great lesson in figuring out how things work.  I love when kids come in and say they noticed how dump trucks and the lifts at Home Depot have pistons like our syringes.  Once you understand something like hydraulics you begin to see this technology all around us and be curious about it.

Ms. Strobl's 6th Grade Science classes came to CLIC to do hands on projects based on what they are learning in science this month.  Ms. Strobl has been teaching about continental drift, tectonic plates, Pangaea, and scientific evidence of how the continents have moved over time.  Students applied what they have learned to create movable scientific models of Pangaea.  They worked collaboratively in groups representing each continent.  Students had to research and create 3-dimensional continents with mountain ranges, volcanoes, and land forms. They learned how to model and sculpt with plaster. Groups had to work together to have their continents and evidence match up.  Continent groups also created fossil evidence and scientific labels so that viewers would learn about continental drift from their display.  

Classes went on to further their understanding by creating models of the earth's layers and tectonic plate models.  The end results were fit for a science museum.