Earl Bakken Science Program - Day 1

Today was the first day of the Earl Bakken Science Program. We had two session, the Explorers met this morning from 9 until 12 noon, the Inventors & Investigators met this afternoon from 1:30 to 4:00. During both sessions we worked on solving challenges that had to with simple machines.

Morning

Balance Beam Challenge - Try to balance 10 weights on the balance beam.

Battery Bulbs and Wires Activity - Working in groups, students are giving a bag of batteries, bulbs, wires, and other electrical stuff and they experiment. We explored switches, parallel and series circuits, and circuit diagrams.

Afternoon
Monument Mover Challenge - How do you move a very heavy 'monument' across a desert island. That was our challenge. We only had materials to make simple machines. We were able to use an incline plane, several wheels, a pulley system, and a few levers to make it work.

Programming the Basic Stamp Micro controller - We started a tutorial on how to use a Basic Stamp micro controller. Controlling outputs like lights and motors, sensing inputs from switches, and some fundamental programming concepts like condition statements and loops. Good stuff!