Last week we did one of my favorite STEM projects, the Marshmallow Catapult. Since it’s close to Halloween, instead of marshmallows, we launched plastic eyeballs from the dollar store! The kids had a ton of fun, and we had eyeballs flying all over the room. Those safety glasses I bought at Fazzio’s this summer sure came in handy.
We started by building our first catapults together. Once we had built and tested them, we talked about how they worked and what we could do to modify them to make them launch farther or higher. The kids had some great ideas about angles, height, and length, and the second part of class gave them free rein to modify their catapults and test their hypotheses. Even some of the teachers got in on the fun. It was a great lesson for all involved.
