Burning Calories
In our new unit on energy, students have been learning about transforming and conserving energy. To help students explore how energy can make things go, students made rubber-band racers and experimented to figure out how many times to twist the rubber band in order to win the “Sweet Spot” race. There was a lot of “energy” in the room as students tried to roll their elastic rollers into the “sweet spot” on the floor of the school foyer. While the design of the rollers sometimes impeded the ability for consistent motion, students had a lot of fun creating elastic energy and seeing this energy transformed into motion. To follow-up with this idea of different ways to make things move, we watched a video show food is the fuel for our body. The video illustrated one way that scientists can figure out how much energy is in a particular food — by setting the food on fire!