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We started this week's lesson by testing our boats. We were pleasantly surprised to see that some of the boats worked really well, especially the barge-style ones. The winning boat held 9 cups of gravel! We then moved into our lesson for today, gears. We tried to start the lesson with a very basic idea of gears by asking questions like "How does the power go from the engine to the wheels in a car?" and "What do the gears on a bike do?" This didn't work as well as we would have liked, as kids imagined the gear shift in the car as purely the apparatus that lets you shift from drive to park, and those that did have bike experience just knew that the gears "help you to go faster or slower." But it was a start, and that led into our lesson about gear ratios. It was a difficult concept for some of the students to grasp, so after a few different explanations, we started the activity, hoping that hands-on learning would help those who were still struggling. The task was to pull up a pumpkin using a motor we provided and the gear train that they built. Although most kids seemed to grasp the concept of how the gears should be placed, there were some issues with how to physically put it together. We provided an example gear to help, but than many groups just copied the example instead of thinking about how the gears should be placed on their own. In the end, though, all groups were able to lift the pumpkin.
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