Disaster+Blaster+Week+08

Week 9, October 24, 2013

Games: Zac brought games. One of the games required a person to call out the instructions. The kids had to pair up and follow the instructions. For example, the caller said, "Knees to toes." One kid had to touch his knees to his teammates toes and his teammate had to touch his knees to his teammates toes. This game required a lot of trust and instruction following, but they also did an excellent job of waiting for their turn to act as the caller, making sure each child got a turn, and doing so in an orderly fashion. The other game that Zac organized is the birthday game, where children have to line up according to the month of their birthday without talking. The method finally chosen was to show others the number of the month of his or her birthday, for example seven fingers represented July. This worked ok, except there were a couple of children who didn't understand that system. They managed to find their places somehow. We talked about other systems we could use instead.

Team Business Meeting: We had to decide on a natural disaster to focus on for the rest of our season. After a discussion of the choices, we compiled a list of four favorites. We discussed a couple of ways to make a final decision and eventually decided to vote on the matter, with all members agreeing that they would have a positive attitude towards whatever was chosen. After two votes, they were still tied. Their assignment was to research hurricanes and tornadoes in an attempt to learn more about each and decide which would be more interesting to study. We also discussed team shirt, and they voted to decide which design they want to use. It was an almost unanimous decision.

Projects: The kids presented more community helpers. There was a video about a earthquake scientist, a presentation about the Red Cross, and information about police and firefighters.

Build: One of the parents in our group loaned us an advanced engineering toy. The toy consists of many 3 inch plastic tubes that are about 1 inch in diameter and lots of plates. You build structures with these tubes and plates on a special table. The table is hooked up to some type of air powered pump so that when you work the pump it causes the table to shift and potentially knock down your structures if they aren't built strongly enough. The team worked with this for a while. They also filmed the tests with the ipad and used a slow motion camera app to watch the towers fall.