Adding A Little Twist To An Old Experiment

Most of you have probably heard of or done the egg drop experiment with your class. You know the one-students design a container to protect an egg when dropped from a high place.

To introduce this investigation, I found several excellent video clips of the experiment on youtube.com. Here is one of the videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb1uduZcvY4
I shared this video with my class; then let them design their own investigation.

As students dropped the eggs, I had other classmates take pictures of them with the digital cameras.

The new twist was integrating the technology. Not all technology integration has to be a huge event.

Make a Smilebox photobook

Design A New Classroom

Now that the year is almost over, we can have a little fun. However, I always want them to continue learning; so one activity we did was "Design A New Classroom."

I had students measure the area of our classroom, desk, cabinets, closet, door ways, windows, the sink and anything else that I could think of. Then they drew a picture of their desired classroom to scale on graph paper using the dimensions of the items they measured. Next, they used the internet and catalogs to look up the prices of everything. They put the data into a Numbers Document and calculated the cost of their model classroom.

For fun students used cardboard or foam to create their version of the model classroom to scale. This part students found fun and challenging. Since it was the end of the year this was a good activity to review math skills we learned while having fun creating a model. It took students several days to complete the activity. They were astounded when they discovered the actual price of these model classroom.