It’s never too early to share what you are learning! Find a word in this book that people may not know but they should. Write your word and the sentence it appears in on 1 piece of paper. Then, draw or create a definition that people can use to learn that word. You can teach people using this book!
A quick note on materials before we get started. We can provide kits, or you can find these materials around your house or for a couple dollars at the grocery store. We recommend:
Spaghetti and Marshmallows for our youngest builders. They are easy to work with (but a bit sticky).
Straws and Tape for tower builders that want to reach the sky
Toothpicks and gummy candy for tower builders that want to test the strength of these small materials.
We also utilize a few free bridge building apps to help you test these ideas out in virtual physics simulators:
Build a Bridge! is a freemium game available on Android and iOS.
Bridge Construction Free is a limited free game available for iOS.
Physics Simulation Building Destruction is a free game available on Android and iOS.
Here are the STEM challenges that will help you build your brain power!
Challenge 13: Build the first 5 bridges in the app. (Click here if you have trouble installing it!)
Challenge 14: Build the tallest tower possible with 20 straws and tape.
Have you talked about forces in school yet? If so, you are in luck because we are about to talk a lot about forces.
Boats float because water pushes up on the bottom of the boat. You also know another force that affects boats: gravity. Gravity pushes down on boats while water pushes up.
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You may hear about Archimedes Principle. Over 2000 years ago, Archimedes found a simple way to figure out if boats float. It has three steps:
Determine the weight of the boat.
Determine the weight of the water the boat moves out of the way.
If the water weighs less than the boat, then it will sink.
This relationship also shows that if a boat is floating, then it moves exactly that weight of water away.
Here is a great video that shows this relationship and its interesting history.
In FLEET, you can see the forces of gravity and forces of buoyancy whenever your ship is on the water.
Two vertical forces balance out when a boat is floating on the water.
Please upload your Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone(TM) projects here if you would like to share them with our community of Potter fans. We hope you had fun completing it (and you fell more in love with this story!!)