Science Action Club (SAC) is an activity we have been doing in the R.O.C.K. Tech Lab for the past few Mondays -- we will continue to do it every Monday for the rest of the semester! The focus of SAC this semester is birds and bird watching. Do you know what the scientific name for a bird watcher is? Yes, it IS ornithologist!
The first activity consisted of us making our very own birds with various wings, beaks, feet, and bodies. We talked about what our birds ate, if they were predators or prey, and what their environment was like. We're so excited to begin our citizen science experiments with bird counting in our own back yard. Thanks to the Cal Academy of Sciences for this incredible partnership! More to come! Calling all Warriors fans! R.O.C.K. was so lucky to partner with the Warriors and PwC in March to welcome Andrew Bogut to Vis Valley Middle School! Andrew talked with us about financial responsibility and how important it is to know how to save and invest your money. He joined us in taking a career quiz to figure out what our strengths and passions are! He's welcome back to the R.O.C.K. Tech Lab anytime! Go Warriors!
If you can make a propeller that spins the fastest, does that make it the best? What if it spins really slow but is able to move a lot of air? How do we measure how fast propellers move? These are some questions we explored in our workshop with the Exploratorium and Google! We had fun beta testing the Google app as well as building, decorating, and testing our propellers. We were able to measure how fast they spun and compared our scores with one another. Thanks to Google and the Exploratorium for this awesome workshop series!
Picture this: you have 30 minutes to complete a video scavenger hunt in your team of 3 people. You have a list and a camera! GO!
This is what we did this semester during our documentary film unit. We put our knowledge into practice to understand how to film long shots, interviews, wide shots, foreground shots, high angle shots, and more! We loved this activity and will definitely be visiting it again! On this day of our film curriculum, we thought about how to even begin making a documentary. For some help, we watched this YouTube video about a how to make a documentary film. The subject? Sriracha! Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKGHkTljh0.
We learned that in a narrative structure we need: a protagonist, a desire, a journey, and a discovery. If you conduct interviews, you should think of the questions in advance and figure out how their answers will contribute to your overall message! We look forward to continuing our documentary film unit for the month of May! Lights! Mirrors! Action!
This workshop with the Exploratorium on mirrors and light was fantastic. It gave us the opportunity to experiment with lights, lasers, fog, mirrors, and our own drawings. We learned about how light passes through mirrors and we made kaleidoscopes with beads, water, and a folding mirrors. It was super fun and we're glad they're coming back for another workshop doing Scribble bots! Thanks Viv and team! |
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May 2016
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