TinkerLab - Balloon Powered Vehicles!

In Moana 3, every Friday we have our TinkerLab challenge... last week we started our challenge with CREATE.  

Creating, Thinking, Problem Solving, Collaborating!

We have our big junk box and our challenge this week was to create a vehicle that was powered by air out of a balloon.  

Most of us worked in buddies and created many different vehicles.  

We soon realised that we had to have free moving wheels and we had to think hard about how the propulsion from the air coming out of the balloon was going to move our vehicles and where we needed to attach the balloons - did we blow them up first or did we have to attach them and then blow them up?  Lots of critical thinking!

There was lots of practicing, taping and re-taping, modifications, changes and discussion!

At the end of our 30 minutes we had a SHARING session with each other where we looked at each other's creations and discussed what modifications we could make for next time.  

We then did some LEARNING where we researched balloon powered cars and found out how to make the most of the propulsion coming from the balloon.

We are going to TRY AGAIN this week, using what we learned from our own creations and what we researched.  Watch this space to see how we got on...

UPDATE:  Some of our cars were slightly more successful than others!  We learned that it was all about the wheels and axle.  Those cars with good round wheels went the best.  We also learned that to make an axle, we needed a skewer to go through a straw.  We were really happy with the results!!!
Our next challenge - using what we have learned here, we are going to create powered boats: propellors, balloon or jet.

Celebrating our Diversity!

For Term 2 we are going to have TinkerLab time where each week we are going to work with 'junk' to create around a theme.

In Moana we have 16 different nationalities!!  We think that is pretty impressive - don't you?

Koka Ngaire set us a challenge to Celebrate our Diversity through creating...



 This week:

We had to get in groups of 4 and Koka Ngaire gave us 20 sheets of newspaper, 1 metre of sellotape and 40 mins - that was it!!
We had to choose one nationality from our group and create a national costume using the newspaper... we had to make it really obvious which country our costume was from - Koka Ngaire and Koka Rachel (our DP) were judges (Koka Nolian our Principal came to see what all the excitment was about too!)

We had to communicate effectively with each other, we had to problem solve, we definitely had to think and we made connections with each other and to our cultures.

It was really fun and we definitely celebrated our diversity within our class!

Who do you think achieved our goal?