Giggles and laughs echo down the halls of Discovery Community School this summer. It is the Young Scholars Summer Camp, and students are working on their project presentations to parents.
Young Scholars is part of the talent development and accelerated services programming of St. Cloud Area School District 742. It is designed to help kids reach their full potential. Students in this program must be creative and divergent thinkers.
Kindergarten through fifth-graders attend the camp. There are four separate units of engineering and design: bubble bonanza, rocket engineering, earthquake engineering and safety parachuting.
Students are grouped together to design and architect their projects.
Bubble bonanza with kindergarten and first-graders is all about creating the perfect design to make the largest bubble and the most amount of bubbles as well as to figure out if they could change the shape of a bubble.
During the design process, the students use different types of materials to create a bubble-maker: strings, plastic and pipe cleaners.
String is used for the design in creating the largest bubble. The students realize their string would often get tangled. Straps made of electrical ties are then added as handles to help keep the string from entanglement.
They uncover that no matter what shape they make the bubble-maker, the bubbles only appear spherical. However they do discover by using a three-dimensional cube, the bubble inside the cube would remain a cube. Using a straw dipped in the soap solution and then gently blowing on the edge of the existing bubble would create two bubbles with one straight edge.
“Remember: gently now,” says Jean Sautner, second grade teacher.
Giggling while performing the demonstration to parents, Miranda Frank gently blows on her straw to attach a second bubble in the cube.
Second and third grade students are anxious to show-off their engineered designs. Rockets made of different types of paper and shapes are rocketed down the hall to determine flight distance. Planets are aligned down the hallway to measure the launch distance of each rocket.
Hannah Schlueter-Block shares, “We had to think about how the airplanes were made with the tiles and the weight . . . . My favorite part [of camp] was blasting the rockets.”
Schlueter-Block’s rocket makes it past Pluto on the first try. After tweaking the design, the rocket launches a little farther.
Fourth and fifth-grade students are trying to save lives in an earthquake. They are architecturally redesigning buildings to withstand high-point Richter scale earthquakes.
Lily Mack and Fatuma Hassan explain what the design process is before demonstrating their building design.
1. Ask the question you want answered.
2. Imagine what it would look like.
3. Plan the design.
4. Create the design.
5. Improve on the design.
Popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, tape, paper, cardboard and ping pong balls were used to build each earthquake resistant structure. Every structure with its unique design is shown to withstand the simulated earthquake.
“Camp was an opportunity to take those kids [Young Scholars] and give them several hours a day to do engineering and hands-on experiences where they were able to apply what they learned in small group Young Scholars to real situations,” says Laura Steabner, licensed coordinator for talent development and accelerated services. “They got to see what real engineers do and replicate some of the things . . . real engineers do. They really got to take what they learned during the school year and work together on a team and collaborate as people do in the real world, to advance that type of thinking and their mindset even more.”
Students experiencing the camp build on the knowledge they’ve acquired during the school year and can’t wait to get back to school to continue on with their work!
To watch the video click HERE.