Newsletter 3: Engineering Exercises at Home
Welcome to the third Doodle STEAM Newsletter!
We believe that fostering a love of science, technology, engineering, the arts, and maths starts at home. Doodle STEAM is an excellent tool for parents to use with their children because it combines fun, interactive activities with educational content in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, fostering creativity and critical thinking skills in a playful and engaging way. To encourage continued engineering exploration, here are some simple and playful suggestions for engineering fun to explore with your child.
What You’ll Need to make a Marshmallow Bridge
- Marshmallows (big, small or a mix)
- Dried, uncooked spaghetti and/or
- Cocktail sticks
What to do
- Challenge your child to design and build a bridge using the marshmallows, dried spaghetti and/or cocktail sticks. The goal is that the structure of the bridge is strong enough to hold some weight.
- Select a number of objects of various size and weight (e.g. an eraser, the TV remote, a water bottle) and test the constructed bridge to see which objects it can hold and which objects are too heavy.
- Encourage your child to rethink their bridge design and structure to try and make it stronger.
The Engineering Design Process
By designing, constructing, testing and tweaking their bridge, your child is engaging in the engineering design process similar to that used by engineers in real life!
Questions to Ask Your Child:
💡 Can you tell me about your design?
💡 What is the strongest part of you bridge?
💡 What is the weakest part?
💡 Is your bridge stable?
💡 Do you need to add more sticks or marshmallows? Where are they needed?
Explores the principles of flight and engineering!
What You Need:
💡Paper (various sizes and thicknesses)
💡Scissors, rules, cellotape, markers/crayons
What to do:
🔧 Discuss the concept of flight and the aerodynamic shape of airplanes.
🔧 Encourage your child to use their imagination to design a paper airplane.
🔧 Together with your child, build their design of various size and thickness.
🔧 Test the airplanes and use the ruler to measure the distance they cover during each flight.
🔧 Your child can document the results on a sheet of paper.
🔧 Ask your child to consider how the design of the paper airplanes can be improved.
🔧 You can also try adding some weight such as a paper clip to the paper airplane and see what happens.
STEAM Words to Use with Your Child:
Design | Construct | Prototype | Model | Test | Measure | Force | Aerodynamics | Structure | Stability
Please contact Denise Lakes, Literacy and STEAM Co-ordinator (denise.lakes@cdi.ie) for further details and information on bringing Doodle STEAM to your school.
Denise Lakes: Literacy and STEAM Co-ordinator
+353 1 414 7362 | denise.lakes@cdi.ie
