Lets Collaborate- The Great Egg Drop Challenge

The @grade1class had a great time collaborating with @grade1osc in Colombo, Sri Lanka this week via Skype. @prashanigamage and I got our kids to work together and share in a design challenge. The challenge? To design a ‘holder’ that would hold a raw egg that would be safe from a drop of ??. The drop distance was dependent on each class. We were learning about metres and centimetres. We decided we wanted to see of our package could withstand a fall from 1 metre or 2. The grade 1 class had larger aspirations and chose the second story of their school building- about 5 metres in height!!  We all dropped our eggs. What did the @grade1class learn?

• that eggs break
• The way we design something makes a difference
• Planning is important
• we know that things fall faster the higher they are
• we need to work as a team, communicate, and respect others ideas.
• We roughly know how long a metre is.
• We use and share each other’s designs and are not ‘copying’ but collaborating

So how cool was that! We worked in some Maths, Language AND Science without the kids knowing!  Sneaky right? Well not really. It all became explicit over the week examining video and images of our journey. Talking about it. Some kids wanted to make a better package. Some disputed the measurement of the drop done by me). Actually there was more ‘math’ in the @grade1class as describes here..another post maybe but they got the pint I think that speed can be determined by height.  NB: I didnt force the kids to sit and reflect quietly (shhh) about it. This week was chaotic and noisy. Learning was happening.