Move & Learn: DIY STEM Forts!

Patria Lincoln Posted On Mar 26, 2020 | STEM

Even when you're learning at home, you still need recess! That's why we're coming up with lots of activities that get kids moving and learning at the same time. Today's activity adds some extra STEM fun to the classic art of fort-building.

Gather Materials

Everyone's house is filled with different stuff, so everyone's STEM Forts will look a little different. As you gather your fort-building materials, ask your kids what they think each item might be used for in the building process. Your final item lists may vary, but we recommend some or all of the following: couch cushions and pillows, bed sheets, twine or laundry line, small furniture items (chairs, coffee tables, ottomans), poles (yardsticks, mops, brooms).

Get Creative

Once you have your materials, it's time to start daydreaming about what kinds of forts you're going to build. This is a great opportunity to encourage your kids to stretch their imaginations. Ask them about their vision for the fort; are they building a moon base, or a castle, or a superhero hideout? What kinds of pretend features or creatures might the fort contain?

Build STEM Skills

Building any kind of fort helps your kids strengthen their early engineering and design skills, but you can add even more learning to the fort-building with the following challenges:

Shape Forts: Can you build a fort in the shape of a square, or a rectangle, or a triangle? What about a circle? How does the process change for each shape?Tallest/Longest Fort: How high can you make your fort before it topples over? How long can it get before the walls start to sag? What reinforcements can you make to keep your fort standing?

Multi-Room Forts: If you've mastered the single-room fort, can you design a fort with a second or third room? What will you use for the passages?

Simplest Fort: Who can build a fort with the smallest amount of materials? How does the process get harder or easier with fewer pieces?

Fort Race: Have builders take turns selecting from materials they want to build with. Once all the materials are selected, have a race to see who can build their fort the fastest. Our Digital Timer is the perfect tool to help keep track of race times!

At Learning Resources, we’re here to help you make the best of this challenging time. Stay safe and healthy, and check back with our blog for more tips and learning ideas as the situation unfolds.

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Patria Lincoln | Posted on Mar 17, 2020

At Home Overnight Science Experiments

Each family in the United States has found themselves at home…for a while. All this time has afforded us precious hours to do things we might not otherwise do. At Learning Resources, our minds turn toward STEM, and all the long-term experiments we might have put on the back burner simply due to a of lack of time.

Below are a few overnight experiments that take a while. But hey – time is on our side!

The Naked Egg

How can you make an egg stay fully intact without its shell? The answer is (to this and many things): science!

You will need:

Eggs
Vinegar
Cups
Corn syrup (for later)

All you have to do is drop the eggs in, one per cup, and pour in the vinegar. The egg should be completely covered with the liquid. It’s okay if the egg floats a bit.

A chicken egg shell is made up of calcium bicarbonate. The acid makeup of the vinegar begins to react with the calcium of the egg shell. After just a short while, you will see bubbles appearing on the outside of the egg. This is carbon dioxide gas as a result from that reaction.

But now comes the hardest part: the waiting. It can take 12-24 hours before a good portion of the shell is removed. More bubbles and froth will appear.

After the day of soaking, carefully remove the egg from the vinegar. The egg was soft, but still had a white, powdery coating. You can scrape it off, but with the egg being so delicate, it might break. Be careful!

We used a flashlight to find the yolk in the dark. The egg glowed something awesome, but the yolk was hard to pinpoint.

So we poured some fresh vinegar in the cup, and soaked it for another 12 hours.

The egg came out the next morning very rubbery and fragile. We slipped the naked egg into a cup filled with corn syrup and let that soak overnight. The results were amazing! Because the corn syrup has very little water content and the egg does, the water inside the egg begins to move across the membrane (“skin” layer) and starts to equalize. What’s left is a very baggy egg.

How to Make a Rainbow Bouquet

While you are grabbing essentials at your local big box store, why not grab a bouquet of fresh flowers? Creating your own rainbow bouquet can be turned into a fragrant scientific experiment over the course of a few nights. A trick often used by florists, dyeing white roses or carnations with colored water is actually an example of capillary action, or the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces against gravity.

What you will need:

White roses or carnations
Scissors or knife (adults only!)
Containers
Food coloring and water

Remove all the leaves from the stem of the flower. The experiment is to see how the colored water will travel to the white petals, so you don’t want water diverted to the leaves.

Once the roses are clean, have an adult snip or cut them with a knife at an angle, leaving about 6-7 inches (adults only!).

Next, stir up the liquid your flowers will be drinking for the next few days. Decide on your colors and place about 10-15 drops of food coloring in each container. Add warm tap water until the containers are about halfway full. Stir well!

Place your flowers in their containers. Here, two were placed in each container.

THREE HOURS

Recently snipped flowers can be pretty thirsty. This is what the stem and bud of the blue flower looked like after just three hours.

12 HOURS

The next morning, the tips of the flower petals (and most dry part of the flower) were beginning to show color. How deep will the color be with each passing day?

DAY TWO

At the two-day mark, the colors were distinguishable, and the roses were thriving.

DAY THREE

By the third day, the flowers were just beginning to wilt, but the colors were the most vibrant, but still a pastel hue.

These roses were colored by capillary action. The colored water was pulled through the stem and made its way up to the petals. Transpiration occurs when the colored water evaporates from the flower petals.

Overnight Crystals

Some crystals take several days to grow, but here’s a simple overnight recipe to get some great crystals grown right in your refrigerator.

You will need:

Epsom salt
Food coloring
Clear glass cup

Epsom salt is another name for magnesium sulfate.

In the clear glass, fill ½ cup really hot tap water, then stir in ½ cup of the Epsom salt. Stir for at least one minute. While some salt crystals will be not dissolved at the bottom of the glass, your stirring has created a saturated solution that’s ready to make crystals.

Then add food coloring of your choice. Place the glass in the refrigerator and wait until the morning!

Wow! By cooling this solution rapidly, it encouraged fast crystal growth due to the dense solution. Crystals grown this way will be thin and plentiful.

Happy Overnight Science!