STEM Club Reloaded

We had  second attempt at relaunching STEM Club today – and it was much more successful than the trip that we were forced to abandon last week. This week we just ran a few simple challenges for a group of Y7, Y8 and Y9 students.

Science: Neutralise it

We gave the students some sodium hydroxide and added a couple of drops of universal indicator. The students had to neutralise it with some hydrochloric acid – harder than it sounds. We challenged them to do this in less than two minutes.

Engineering: Paper towers

The challenge was to build a structure that would hold a ping pong ball as high up as possible, using just newspaper and two long strips of Sellotape (about 3 metres). Last time we did this, some enterprising students tried to tape a tower to the ceiling, so this time I told them that they could only use the paper and tape to build a tower on the table. Of course, some of them promptly utilised the table leg as a support – evidently I need to work on my instructions!

Maths: Möbius strips

Obviously this was my favourite challenge. We gave the students a strip of paper and asked them to turn it into something with only one side. They tried really hard, but we weren’t surprised when they didn’t manage it.

We demonstrated how to make a Möbius strip, then did all the usual stuff:

• coloured the strip and watched amazed faces appear as they realised that something most unexpected was happening
• coloured the edges of the strip to prove that it also only had one edge
• cut down the middle of the strip to cut it in half – except of course we didn’t, then repeated the process and enjoyed the baffled and amazed looks on our students faces.

They loved it. ‘Why can’t we do this in maths Miss?’ one student asked. No reason at all, in fact I think the Möbius strip might get revisited very soon.

Anyway, I think it all went well, the students obviously had great fun and said that they would be back next week. All in all, a pretty successful first session.