Cupid's Blow Dart STEM Challenge

This year's Midwest winter has been brutal.  Between piles of snow and ice storms, school has been called off early, delayed or cancelled more times than the entire time I worked at the high school. To keep Xander from going stir crazy, I proposed this Valentine's Day STEM challenge to him. 

The idea came from a game we are playing at his school party where the kids use straws to blow Q-Tips at some plastic cups.  I found the lightest plastic cups at the store and added some paper hearts to make them pretty (totally unnecessary). 

For Xander's Challenge, I gave him a handful of straws, some masking tape and a couple sheets of scratch paper.  His goal was to create the straw that would allow him to hit down cups from the farthest back.

He tried cutting down the straws, taping some straws together and attaching paper to the end of the straw.  I also encouraged him to play with where he put the Q-Tip in the straw before he blew.  I could not find any of the fat smoothie straws, but those would be a great addition to see how diameter affects the force.  The trick in experimenting, was that he had to try to blow with the same force every time.

It turned out to be a quick and easy challenge to keep him occupied for a while.  I am interested to see what he does with his findings when he gets to the party at school!

Rescue the Penguins Helicopter Lift STEM Challenge

It was cold and snowy last weekend and I wanted to come up with a way to keep Xander busy without screens.  We hadn't done a STEM/STEAM challenge in a while, so it was the perfect opportunity.

The scenario:

I told him that his job was to make a "helicopter lift" to carry the stranded penguins back home.  The helicopter was a piece of string tied to a stool and a large paper clip I'd bent open.  He'd have to build a lift or boat that he could swing the paper clip to, pick up and then set down on the other side of the water (we set out paper to symbolize the water, for a tougher challenge, you could spread them out and go from one sheet of paper to the other).  Whatever he built had to be strong enough to carry all the penguins (we used about 10 from his Toobs).

The Materials:

I gave him pipe cleaners, aluminum foil and tape.  We used the paper for the water and the string and a large paper clip for the helicopter.

Building his lift. 

Xander had my husband and me each make a lift also.  We ended up with some VERY different designs. 

Using the string and paper clip to hook his lift ended up being a lot tougher than he expected. 

The first attempt crashed in the water. 

He made it, but only with one.  He ended up having to re-design his lift to make it accommodate all the penguins.

Trying out a different design.

This is a challenge that could easily be done with other toys.  We thought about rescuing Santa or Saving the Polar Bears (which would be a good environmental science tie in activity), but Xander wanted penguins.

Magnetic Marble Run... Almost - Taking the Small Wins

So I admit that I have a slight obsession with all things early education.  I particularly LOVE constructive, open ended toys.  They are so wonderful in that they allow children to make and test predictions immediately (can I balance this on my tower without it falling), adjust plans, and solve problems without them even realizing.  Not to mention, I kind of always wanted them as a child, but really didn't have too many because I was a girl, although that's a totally different post!  Anyway, I've always got my eye out for fun toys like that and reading the book Design Make Play, made me start thinking about how I could make some of my own at home.

One idea I came up with was a magnetic marble run.  I saved a bunch of paper towel and toilet paper tubes and when I had plenty, I attached some dot magnets and cut semicircles at some of the ends.  I had all these visions of big elaborate marble tracks crisscrossing my fridge.  I saved a yogurt container that I planned to use to "catch" the marble at the end.  Xander was super excited.

Sadly, it was not to be.  The magnets weren't strong enough and the marbles were too heavy.  When they would come to an end where we expected it to go back the other way, the marble would rotate the tube and fall to the floor.  The magnets also fell off the yogurt container.  We were both a little disappointed.  However, we kept playing with it and found that Xander liked making shorter tracks and shooting them into a plastic shoe-box that I put all the tubes in.  It seems to work fine as long as you don't try to switch back the opposite direction down the fridge.  That first day he played almost half an hour (eons in toddler time!).  He's also gotten it out since.  Oh, and used the tubes as telescopes, microphones, swords etc.

Even though it didn't quite turn out like planned, it still ended up being a fun, creative, inexpensive activity for him.  The magnetic tubes will probably stay on our toy shelves for quite a while.  

As happy as I am with this homemade version, I will admit, I purchased him some transparent marble runs from Lakeshore because they're currently a bonus buy.  I'm excited that we'll have both kinds of runs to play with!