Reflection

This week our students were finally able to see what Nepalese farmers really do to solve their tomato challenge.  They created a gravity ropeway that uses the weight of the produce and the incline of the mountain to bring the tomatoes to market without having to use any external energy at all!  Check out this video to see it in action!

After watching these videos, the students had the opportunity to engineer with the many STEAMy toys here in the library, or to create art at an art table. The adults in the room talked to students individually about their successes in this challenge using Hartford's Transferable Skills Critical Thinking & Problem Solving rubric.  It was so great to be able to reflect on student learning with the students one-on-one!

While they waited, the students showed off their engineering and artistic brains!

Taking the time to reflect with students about their thinking and their designs is an incredibly insightful learning tool.  We can't wait to share all this information with the classroom teachers!

Getting Our Tomatoes To Market!

What an AMAZING day of learning for our OQS Engineers!  Last week, after months of preparation, our students went out into the forest to test the prototypes of their solutions to the Practical Action Squashed Tomato challenge!

Students had to keep the principles, observations, and people involved in the problem in mind throughout the design process to be successful.  We continued to bring them back to the ideas we gathered using our Innovator's Compass before we started building back in October!

Let's see how successful they were!

We went out into the woods of our very own Tools Trail to test their designs in a setting similar to that which the farmers of Nepal live.  We couldn't do anything about the snow!

We had a rope already set up for any student who wanted to simulate a zipline.  Other than that, all of the innovation was up to them!

Final Design Day

Students worked very hard to complete their prototypes in STEAM last week. We will be testing their designs in the forest this Wednesday and Friday! It's going to be so exciting; they've been working on this project all year!

 

 

We can't wait to see the results of their design thinking, perseverance, reflection, and hard work!