If you read my blog, and I hope you do, then you know that I only teach STEM/Science and I frequently use this space to talk about the great things we accomplish in our lab. Lest you think I am a superwoman and all things are always terrific, let’s take a look at some not-so-great moments, my failure moments! This humorous look at our STEM lab is all about failures (that might have taught us a thing or two)!

It only took me about a minute and a half to know this was a bad idea. The kids were supposed to pull back the rather flimsy yard stick to a certain distance and let go. The stick should  fly forward and strike the car. The more you pull it back the farther the car should go. Right?

Nope!

Too many uncontrollable variables. It depends on the person pulling back and how the stick slides on the floor and so many other things. We tried it for two classes and then I ditched this idea.

Besides by then I had two broken sticks and at least three kids that got popped in the head by a swinging stick.

Apparently they also make great twirling batons.

The take-away: we had great discussions about variables- which makes me think the kids understand that concept!

MEASURING, that’s why. Now, mind you, I am not saying nobody cooks anymore, but really nobody cooks. I mean we open boxes and frozen things and throw dinner together. I am guilty of that, too. So, it is no wonder that kids can’t use measuring cups and spoon up some flour. Lots of adults can’t do that either! So, first I had to show them how to level flour on a measuring spoon and in a measuring cup! And, you know what? They actually did quite well with it! It just took five hundred years! So, I gave up on having the kids do the measuring and did it myself. I used about ten thousand little cups and all they had to do was pour in a cup! The experiment was truly amazing and we also got to eat pancakes!

The take-away: they definitely know that a chemical reaction is happening with pancake batter and they know it needs to be perfect if you want the pancake to taste good!

I spent hours, hours, making lab sheets for circuits to have them build. I bought circuit clipart so the sheets would look great. I was really pleased.

When I handed these out in the lab, it took the kids about 4 minutes to be finished. They already knew so much about circuits that these follow up lessons were not needed. They were hooking up parallel and series circuits like nobody’s business.

And there were 45 minutes of class left.

So, I told them to just explore. 945 batteries later we wrote about what we had learned that day.

1. If you hook 5 batteries to one bulb the bulb will explode.

2. Batteries don’t last long when you open and close the switches a lot! (That’s why we needed 945 batteries. And I’m talking about D cell batteries, the ones that cost 8 million dollars.)

3. Buzzers are super easy to hook up and they are also very, like extremely annoying. (This was one of the tasks- hook up a buzzer that will alarm when you open a box.)

4. Exploring with circuits is so much more fun than doing lab sheets.

The story from the engineering kit was about frog skin, but I didn’t use that story because I thought it was silly and I really didn’t think my kids would buy into it. So, I made up my own story. My story was about designing a filter system.

Anyway, testing the materials was interesting, but it used 80 gallons of water which was spilled rather regularly. After I swiped the second giant roll of paper towels from the custodian closet I was pretty much done with this one.

In the end we knew to never make a filter out of aluminum foil or netting.

The take-away: I need to think through planning experiments better than I did for this one!

So, here’s what really happened.

First, we spilled pennies about every seven minutes. Then, we had extraordinary amounts of pennies filling up the box, but the table next to us had movement after three pennies so why were we getting such different results?

Then, we had about 14 strings that got in knots because the box would slide off the table. Then we had some kids measuring in centimeters and some in inches so that skewed our data.

Finally I had enough of this insanity and I said, “HOLD IT! STOP EVERYTHING! I will be right back!”

I went to my storage closet and got out the giant box of foam tubes, which luckily were already cut and ready to go. I threw those down and said, “Friction slows things down, build some roller coasters!”

That is not really what happened. We finished the experimenting and talked about how to better control our experiments. Another lesson about variables.

So, there you have it!

I have tons of failures in my STEM Lab.

But it is so fun. I love it when things don’t work because it gives us a chance to discover why and talk about the science behind it. That’s real learning, people! That is why failure is so important!

And just so you will know, this post had a little hyperbole thrown in.

Links to blog posts you might enjoy:

• Newton’s Laws
• Designing Pancakes
• Roller Coasters