Introduction:
This collection of activities is designed to give students in the 3rd and 4th Grade the opportunity to explore core concepts of physics and engineering in a fun and intuitive way! Depending on the length of your class and how much time your students spend working, the total Paper Carnival could be a 1 to 2 day project.
These activities are designed to be friendly for remote classrooms since the only supplies necessary are paper printouts, paperclips, and scissors, which many students have readily available at home. This would also make a great activity for a physical classroom since the setup and cleanup would both be very quick and simple.
In the first two activities, the students will learn about torque, bending moments, and stiffness. Afterward, they will apply their knowledge in an exciting bridge design challenge!
Teacher’s Reference Guide:
This document contains all the information you will need to know to guide this classroom activity. If students have questions about instructions, or difficulty understanding the concepts, this packet will help you clarify them.
Activity 1:
Hand out an instruction sheet to each student along with a copy of the worksheet. Students should follow the instructions for setting up the lever and the base. The goal is for students to understand more about how applying different weights to the lever will change how much the lever/ see saw tips.
Activity 2:
Hand out an instruction sheet to each student along with a copy of the backdrop and the worksheets for part A, B, and C. Either the students should cut out their leaves or the leaves should already be cut out. Make sure that students have the needed tape or heavy textbooks, too. Students should use this activity to learn more about how the length of a leaf affects how much it bends and how the width of the leaf also affects the ability to bend. Students should try to make qualitative observations. If students have extra time, encourage them to test out bending the leaves by placing paper clips on different lines on the leaves. NOTE: smaller paper clips work better for this activity.
Activity 3:
Hand instructions sheet A to half the groups of students, sheet B to the other half, and the backdrop to all of them. These sheets detail how to make structures using a particular paper manipulation technique: either rolling or folding. Students can walk do a gallery walk, or perform mini presentations (for virtual classrooms), to see how different shapes and sizes of bridges affect how many paperclips a structure can hold. If some groups finish early, there is a bonus activity that allows students to design their own structure, and show that off to the class too.
Detailed Scientific Explanation:
Curious students (or teachers!) may want more in depth information on why these materials behaved the way they did from a mathematical or engineering perspective. This document could be useful for helping you design a follow-up lesson plan that helps students synthesize the information they learned from their experiments in a more advanced way.
Further Information:
When designing the Paper Carnival, we went through many iterations of activities before settling on the final version. If you are interested in exploring the concepts taught in these activities but they seem too basic or too complicated for your group of students, feel free to look over our other versions to help you come up with something that works better!
Preliminary Project Description