STEAM News

STEAM Enhancement

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths, more commonly known as STEAM, is aimed at promoting creative and critical thinking among students by having an inter-disciplinary approach. This year, we have a wonderful group of students arriving with great enthusiasm early each Tuesday morning, ready to solve the challenges that lie ahead!

We began with a food challenge...and a messy one at that! Teams of students worked together to build the tallest tower using only dried spaghetti and marshmallows. The tower had to be free-standing and hold a whole marshmallow on the top- engineering at it’s finest. Once the skills of team-building and problem solving had been accomplished, we swiftly moved on to create water filters.

Throughout the upcoming weeks, we will continue the adventure to help solve the water crisis in rural areas where there may only be access to dirty, undrinkable water. Using only natural materials, the challenge students are faced with is to construct a filter which can have dirty water placed in the top and produce clean, drinkable water at the end. It’s been an interesting process. Writing ingredient lists using ‘charcoal’ rather the ‘activated charcoal’ has led to the interesting results! Currently clean water goes in and dirty water comes out. Let’s say there are a few more refinement stages to come. We will conduct a variety of water quality tests, along with research and trial-and-error to hopefully come up with a transportable, workable, DIY water filter. Much fun lies ahead!

The STEAM Team

Groups of students can be seen on our first STEAM Enhancement session where great concentration was required to build the tallest marshmallow-spaghetti tower!

This team’s pyramid structure held up very well. Engineers in the making.