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On January 7, 2025, STEAM in Action had its fifth of five sessions with students at Rice Intermediate School in San Carlos, AZ. The STEAM Team spent 45 minutes facilitating inquiry-based learning and hands-on activities with each 5th-grade class (5 total).
The session was developed to align with Arizona’s 5th-Grade Science Standards - 1) 5.P3U1.4: Obtain, analyze, and communicate evidence of the effects that balanced and unbalanced forces have on the motion of objects. And 2) 5.P3U2.5: Define Problems and design solutions pertaining to force and motion.
For this final session of in-classroom hands-on activities with Rice Intermediate School for the 2025-2026 school year, we continued to explore the features of water, but this time regarding balanced forces creating buoyancy. Students were presented with a sketch of something floating on the surface of water and began to form conclusions as to how something can float. Gravity was identified as the force that pushes down, while water (displacement of the object's weight) pushes up, balancing the forces and creating buoyancy. In small groups, students were given a desk’s length of aluminum foil and masking tape, 4 straws, and 1 ping pong ball and presented with the challenge to create something buoyant. They were encouraged to plan, test, and modify their creation based on initial results. Once they had their final model, they began to place objects - model cars, balls, pennies, and paper clips - on it to see how much weight it could hold before sinking - an unbalanced force.