STEM 4 Everyone
Blog by Shelly Goel
Engineering Workshop held at STEM Center of Excellence with Girl Scouts and Burns & McDonnell!
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Check out the STEM activities below!
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LED Paper Design
Girls will learn about the basics of circuits and will get to make their own LED copper tape circuit incorporated within a design they draw!
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Materials:
Roll of Copper Tape
Cardstock/thick paper for schematic
LEDs
Circular Batteries
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1. Place copper tape on all lines on the template. Make sure to leave a gap in the copper tape so the LED can be mounted properly.
2. Mount the LED to the copper trace using clear tape. To do this, bend both legs of the LED at a 90 degree angle and then tape legs securely to the copper. Make sure that the long leg of the LED goes to the positive (+) side of the copper trace.
3. Last step is to place the coin-cell battery on the copper trace. In this example, make sure the battery (-) is facing down on the copper. The corner flap which is (+) should then be able to contact the battery (+) when folded.
At this point you can secure the corner using a binder clip.
https://www.makerspaces.com/paper-circuits/
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Download the Schematic!
Print one sided on cardstock. Decorate the blank side any way you want!
Water Filtration Lab
The challenge is to filter the dirty water with the given materials and see if they can make it clear. The girls will decide as a team how to layer the materials and which materials to use. They will use litmus paper strips to check the acidity.
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Materials:
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Container
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Filter paper/coffee filters
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2-liter soda bottle cut in half
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napkins or paper towels
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gravel, sand and cotton balls for your filter
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dirty water, you can make it by adding cooking oil, food coloring, pieces of paper, dirt, etc.
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Put the top half of the soda bottle upside-down (like a funnel) inside the bottom half. The top half will be where you build your filter; the bottom half will hold the filtered water.
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Layer the filter materials inside the top half of the bottle. Think about what each material might remove from the dirty water and in what order you should layer the materials.
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Pour the dirty water through the filter.
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Take the filter apart and look at the different layers.
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Wipe the bottle clean and try again. Try putting materials in different layers or using different amounts of materials.
Spaghetti Sticks Marshmallow Structure
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For this engineering challenge you will be building a structure out of spaghetti sticks and marshmallows. The goal of this challenge is that you build a freestanding structure that is at least one foot tall and is able to withstand the weight of at least 10 pennies.
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You can approach this challenge in many ways! Experiment with different base shapes, doubling the spaghetti sticks, using multiple marshmallows, etc.
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By the end of this challenge see how many pennies your structure can hold!
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You can also try other variations of this challenge:
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building the tallest, freestanding tower with limited number of spaghetti sticks and marshmallows.
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Use toothpicks instead of spaghetti sticks (though using spaghetti sticks does add more of a challenge!)
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experiment with various sizes of marshmallows
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increase/decrease the height requirement, increase/decrease the limited number of spaghetti sticks, increase/decrease time constraint, increase/decrease required number of pennies structure must hold
