TEXT AND PHOTOS BY AMY NIGHTINGALE OF "THE SILLY SAUSAGES"
Hello, i'm Amy, I'm 11 and I started STEM club in term 3. It's SUPER fun and I do it with Heidi, Aviaya, Isabella and samuel. We do new things every week, and this week was the first day of a 3 week project...designing and making concrete pots, which on the last day, we will put a plant in!
These are the steps we had to go through.
First we made the first bits of the mould frame (the base, and two of the of the sides). We nailed them together with drills and clamps.
Then we designed the other two sides of the mould using easel, which would make our pots have pictures on them.
Then we had to carve them onto wood with the CNC, but only Heidi got too see hers getting done! (It's fine though)
(this photo is of someone else's design by the way! It just happened to be here)
We were done with the actual making of the concrete pots so we learnt about atoms and the periodic table. We learnt about protons, neutrons and electrons. Nigel had a wooden board with circles and marbles to show us more clearly.
Me and Heidi decided to write down all the elements of the periodic table in our notebooks, and we got about halfway through!
then we watched a brain pop video on Marie Curie who discovered radium, and also did a brain pop quiz on atoms.
And we got all the questions right! But after that we decided to do it again and get all the questions wrong just for fun!
My favourite parts were probably using the drill, designing the other two sides and all the extra things we did at the end (pretty much all of it!)
One of the challenges was writing down the periodic table, but I still wanted to do it! It was hard to find the element that came next because they are not in number order, which was how I was writing it.
The whole day was really fun and interesting and I would DEFINITELY recommend stem club if you aren't in it already.