Animal Island: Exploring Diverse Habitats through the Design Process & PBL

Your child and a STEAM TEAM of friends will engineer their way through the Animal Kingdom exploring life in diverse habitats - from rainforests to deserts to ice to the pets that live in our homes. They will learn about the design process and implement it through each of their five STEAM challenges in order to create a unique design for each week: 

Week 1. Antarctic Iceberg: Students will create a toboggan design, mimicking a penguin's physical design, that decreases run times by reducing friction and maximizing velocity. 
Week 2. Taj Mahal: Students will create an appealing playground in the jungle to encourage the monkeys to leave the Taj Mahal and move back to their natural habitat. 
Week 3.Jaguar's Claw: Students will build a Jaguar’s Claw game using a pulley system and magnets.
Week 4. Pet Emergency Room: Students will create a wheelchair for pets using their knowledge of a wheel and axel. 
Week 5. Busy Bee Hive: Students will build one huge honeycomb and make a worker bee that "flies".

Each session follows the following schedule: 
First 10 minutes: Greeting, review rules and design process, discuss challenge (vocabulary) and BRAINSTORM individually and share out as a group
Next 30-40 minutes: Engage in design process/ CREATE /share ideas
Last 10-15 minutes: Share design, answer questions such as: What worked during this process? What did you improve? What was challenging? If you had different materials or more time, what would you have done differently? 

After each sessions, parents/guardians will receive a brief sheet via email/message detailing the lesson and the vocabulary words that were discussed. 

All classes take place via Outschool's platform. We will ship all materials, with an exception of poster board (which can be found at your local dollar store) and a rafter vent (which can be found at a home improvement store). Learners will interact with each other throughout the lesson--sharing ideas, providing input on each other's design, sharing their finished product, etc. Each lesson is student centered and project-based--they will be hands-on and minds-on for the entire hour. There is no required experience necessary to be a part of this fun learning process!