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Heating the Mouse House Level: Primary --- Content: Science and Language Arts |
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In Mr. Tarasov’s primary science classroom, students studied the
question, “What materials keep us warm?” Students assumed the role of
heating and cooling specialists and were charged with designing an insulation
system for a Mouse House. This house would need to keep the animal warm in
the winter by maintaining as much of its body heat as possible. Each student
received a cardboard box with an interior wall that left a three centimeter
space between the wall and the side of the box. The students would need to
experiment filling that space with different materials and determine what
material would allow the least heat to escape from the box in a 20 minute
timeframe. The engineer who designed the most efficient insulation would win
the Mouse House contract. The students were
provided with temperature probes and software for their laptops that received
temperature data from those probes and graphed the data on the fly so that
the students could visualize the changes in temperature within the box. The
roof of each house would need to have a small hole to allow for the probe to
be inserted. To test their materials, students lined the box with
anything that they believed might prevent the heat from escaping; wood, clay,
cloth and the like. By observing the temperature changes on the graph on
their computer screen, students were able to assess the effectiveness of materials
in far less than 20 minutes. Each graph was printed and labeled as part of
the final proposal that would be developed by each engineer. In addition to the
science content, Mr. Tarasov used the project to
teach and assess curricular goals for expository writing. The final product
for each student would be a paper that stated the problem, described the
methodology for testing materials, included results graphs with comments, and
finally proposed a solution. These proposals were published in a custom group
on Scribd. Some of the students
were surprised when metal blocks and plates, which they thought might block
the heat loss the best, turned out not to do so at all. One student found
significant differences when she tried different kinds of metal! The
contract was won by a student whose parent had been a competitive ski racer.
She had found an old garment made of a synthetic material that her mom had
worn when skiing. By cutting the garment to fit and carefully packing the
spaces, she was able to make the coziest Mouse House. The rubric used for
assessment of the project assessed accuracy of each student’s work, the
quality of their interpretation of the data, and the level of content
knowledge they displayed in their proposed solution. Writing skills were
assessed as well using the school expository writing rubric. Tools used in this scenario: |