6th grade students found out today that our Mars outpost water levels were dangerously low.  We realized that we needed to send a probe out to search for water at the base of the crater we were stationed on, but didn’t have any batteries to propel the craft.  Students used their knowledge from the simple machines unit to build rovers which could minimize friction and use gravity to move over distance.

We tested our crater rovers on 3 different angled inclined planes and recorded the metric results in a table.  This class reinforced previous science and math lessons of ramps, data recording, angles, the metric system and experiment design.  Students were also introduced  to the Lego Mindstorm kits that we’ll be using for the next month or so in conjunction with our intro to programming series in tech class.