St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

Senior Infants have been taking part in an after-school club based on STEM. Carl Dempsey from Salesforce has been helping out with the club and we’ve really enjoyed welcoming him to our classroom. All of the sessions were based on nursery rhymes or fairytales.

We measured this tower and it was the tallest!

Session 1 was based on Humpty Dumpty and materials. Humpty Dumpty likes to sit on high structures so we got into groups and built walls as high as we could. The walls had to stand by themselves by the end of the five minutes. We learned a lot about what makes structures sturdy – we discovered that wide bases were the key to making sure they stayed standing.

Working together!

Teamwork was a bit tricky because we all had different ideas. We had to discuss everyone’s ideas and try them out as we went. We noticed that the best structures were the ones where the team worked together!

Next, we tested the best materials to protect Humpty Dumpty from breaking when he fell. First, we had to predict the best material to protect Humpty Dumpty. Predicting is a really important skill when you’re working as a scientist!

We all discussed which one we thought would be most effective and which one we thought would be least effective. Some very interesting predictions drew on our experiences – some people mentioned that tissue paper and paper are used when a parcel is packed so that they predicted that they would protect the egg.

Discussing our work helped us to make better predictions!

Next, we had to test the best material. We learned about fair testing. The only thing we could change was the material protecting Humpty Dumpty. The same person had to drop the egg bag. We used metre sticks to ensure that the eggs weren’t dropped from different heights and the egg tester was really careful to drop the egg rather than throw it! We had started our work on length during the week so we knew how long a metre should be but the metre stick helped us to measure it exactly.

We tested each egg carefully and recorded our results on our prediction sheets. One person was the tester. Another recorded the results and another was the checker – they had to be happy with the test before the tester was allowed to drop the egg.

We were really surprised by how well the rice protected the egg. The tissue paper didn’t protect the egg well at all. We suggested that maybe if there was more of it, or if it was shredded, it might have done a better job. We were also really interested in the PlayDoh. Some of the eggs were better protected than others by the PlayDoh. We think it would be a great investigation to see if we could make a special egg case from PlayDoh in the future!

Carl from Salesforce helped us with our predictions and testing!