DALLAS TWP. — Eight-year-old Nick Bednar studied an image of an airplane before reaching for a clump of white clay to build the aircraft’s fuselage at S.T.R.E.A.M Night at Wycallis Elementary School onNov. 16.
The challenge to construct the plane out of clay and wooden pieces was just one of four Nick and his mom Lori faced that night.
S.T.R.E.A.M Night encouraged all Dallas School District elementary families to test their knowledge of science, technology, robotics, engineering, art and math through fun activities, said Nicole Valkenburg, event co-organizer and STEM instructional coach for both Dallas and Wycallis elementary schools.
“There are two robotic stations where they can learn to code, a catapult-building station, a Star Lab, and art with science station,” Valkenburg said.
Over 250 families accepted the science challenge and attended the event, Valkenburg said.
“I think this is a great idea to get kids involved with these concepts,” Lori Bednar said as she watched her son form the aircraft’s tail out of clay.
The event also offered several fifth-graders an opportunity to volunteer and help younger children apply science concepts to master the task at hand.
Lindsay Matinas, 12, and Kasey Bryant, 11, both fifth-graders at Wycallis were eager to show their underclassmen how to design colored squares that would make a small robot do spins and turns in the school gym.
“Different colors in a certain sequence will make the robot spin,” Matinas said as she used a marker to draw a black line on a white paper and then added small red and green squares to the track.
Bryant placed an Ozobot, a small robot that resembled a mini football helmet with tiny wheels underneath on the black line. The Ozobot traveled along the path until it came to the colored squares, then it spun in a circle.
“That is the coding for the tornado,” Matinas said.
The children tried their hand at making a track with their coding.
Over at the engineering station, Nick Dudick, 8, needed a little help from his dad, Ed, to attach rubber bands to his newly constructed popsicle stick catapult.
Dudick, a second-grader at Dallas Elementary, said making the catapult was difficult but he seemed to enjoy firing designated projectiles at targets.
“I liked the robots the best,” he said.
In the cafeteria at Wycallis, eighth-grade science teacher Dan Flynn set up an inflatable planetarium to conduct a show-and-tell presentation about constellations.
Children, caregivers, parents and grandparents all climbed into the gray inflatable dome. Flynn projected images of the constellations but focused on the Big Bear, the North Star and Orion.
“You can see the Big Bear all year round,” he told a group.
The Big Dipper is part of Big Bear, he said, while using a red light pointer to outline the shape of the constellation.
“If you follow the two outermost stars that form the side of the Big Dipper all the way out to the North Star,” Flynn said.
Bednar said the Star Lab was “pretty cool” and he would try to spot the constellations at night, but the creation of his airplane was consuming his attention.
He managed to stick popsicle sticks into the sides of the clay fuselage for wings. He managed to form a clay plane tail and construct the cockpit out of clay. He found a wooden piece that looked like a plus sign which became the propeller.
“I want to come back,” he said as he examined his final product.
