8th Graders tackle transporting fragile packagesWhen 8th grade Science teachers Warren Lind and Mariam Smith teamed up with Middle School Science teachers from Country Day and asked "How might we better protect fragile items moving through the U.S. Postal Service?", the students stepped up. The project--dubbed "The Pringles Challenge"--was to provide for the safe transfer of a single Pringles chip from the student's home to a nearby school. St. Martin's students were to mail their chips to Country Day, and Country Day students were to mail their chips to St. Martin's.
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Students began by generating a list of research questions. "What happens during the shipping process?" one student asked. "Does shape or density effect durability?" "What is the easiest way to open a package without damaging the contents?" "Should cost be considered?" Students spoke with family, friends, and the passing mail person in order to build empathy and understand the problem from various perspectives. While this initial investigation considered a variety of parameters--everything from the time and distances packages must travel to the varying dispositions of postal workers--the overwhelming issue that the class identified as most critical was the structure of the package itself.
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With this new focus, teams carried out ideation sessions, generating a plethora of ideas regarding the size, shape, weight, and materials of packages. A gigantic set of nestled boxes filled with sand and peanut butter and small feather-filled balloons suspended by rubber bands were just two of the many ideas students came up with. Students were then asked to chose a small subset of ideas--some of which they believed would be most effective in protecting the chip and some of which they simply found intriguing as a possible solution--and then combine and/or expand upon them.
Utilizing their knowledge of force, inertia, and momentum, students then began a rapid cycle of prototyping and testing--constructing their packages and subjecting them to a variety of "postal system-like" conditions, including violent shaking and a drop from a second-story window. |
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Final concepts were built based on this learning and then mailed. On the day of judgment, students watched (via Skype) their packages opened by their colleagues from the partnering school. Many Pringles chips made it completely intact, others with minor damage, and a few came in as a pile of crumbs. Through this process--though it was messy both physically and mentally--students came away with a much fuller understanding of the concepts they had been studying in Physical Science, and more importantly, they understood why it matters to the world beyond school.