Styrofoam Boat Race is a STEM lesson intended for O Level students enrolled in a Cambridge International School. As this is designed by a Physics teacher, the concepts and skills that dominate the lesson are on the subject. The key idea is that, after the lesson has been completed, students should be able to acquire and understand the new Physics competencies through application of previous ones and knowledge on Technology e.g. spreadsheets and video analysis, Engineering designs, Art [aesthetics], and Mathematics skills, i.e. computational and graphical.
The 50-minute lesson plan written and shared here is part of a STEM series of lessons.
- Session 1 [or be completed after 2 sessions]: Briefing of groups where students design a Styrofoam boat using only the materials provided.
- Session 2: The Styrofoam Boat Race where students have fun with the boats while gathering data and recording observations.
- Session 3: The Capstone Project [as written in the lesson plan]
The above STEM lesson / series of lessons carefully considers the ideas learned from the STEM.org Certification programme. Other elements e.g. assessment portfolio and accessibility cannot be explicitly included in the plan or not applicable to the target class. These will be considered in the next STEM lessons to be written and executed by the author.