学校生活

This year’s Summer STEAM event has been a blast with students working in teams to exhibit their creativity, problem solving skills and engineering prowess. In one of the biggest projects of the week, students designed and built bridges out of wood and twine only. With such limited materials, students had to rely on friction, tension, and well-tied knots to keep their structures stable.

In order to foster a team spirit, students of each group painted t-shirts with a team theme. This was a great opportunity for students to express and bond over common interests.

Students then created elastic band powered cars and competed to see whose could travel the furthest. The designs for these ranged from the economic to the eccentric, with students coming up with varied solutions for transforming elastic potential into kinetic energy.

In the next activity, students made good use of balloons, bubble-wrap, and parachutes to keep eggs safe from successive drops of increasing height. Through this, students could learn how models are used in safety testing.

Moving on, students drew on personal experience to produce their own board games. In this, students had to consider how to appeal to their target audiences, both through visuals and engaging game mechanics.

One of the main themes of this year’s Summer STEAM event was environmental impact. To this extent, students were encouraged to use (and reuse) materials efficiently. In line with this theme, students fabricated their own recycled paper from paper scraps, generating products that were both functional and visually attractive.

The next challenge, shield wall, put the students’ teamwork to the test. The students made matching shields out of cardboard, and then practiced forming an impenetrable defense by facing a barrage of (lightweight) projectiles.

As the week drew to a close, pizza was definitely on the menu as students learned how to make this famous Italian dish. The budding chefs could then enjoy the fruits of their labour with a pizza and fries lunch: delicious!

Overall, it was a very successful Summer STEAM event. Students could learn and refine a range of skills, and apply their knowledge and experiences to practical applications. I hope that the students were inspired by what they could achieve by working together.