STEM students in Ms. Binal Shah’s classes combined fun and science in several activities over the past few weeks and learned about everything from problem solving to the different properties of water.

In one experiment, Upper School STEM students created flowers out of coffee filters. “Students learned the concepts of adhesion, cohesion, diffusion and capillary action during this process,” Ms. Shah said. “They learned about the properties of water.”

The students made two kinds of flowers out of coffee filters. In one type, they folded coffee filters into cone shapes and then dipped the point in water with dissolved watercolors. Students learned capillary action which happens through adhesion, Ms. Shah said.

“The students can see how the water travels upwards defying gravity so the nutrients in the water can reach the entire plant,” she said. Adhesion is when molecules stick to the surrounding surfaces more than each other causing capillary action. In plants, capillary action occurs when water gets sucked up through the roots, moving through the plant. As water diffuses through the coffee filter, the colors separate. Students learned about chromatography where different colors that make up the solution travel at different rates, separating the colors.

 In a second experiment, students colored a coffee filter with watercolor markets and then sprayed it with water, Ms. Shah said. Students noticed how the water dissolved the colors, mixing them together through diffusion.

Students then used the colorful coffee filters to create flowers by attaching them like petals. They later used LED lights to light up their flowers and connect the light to a battery with copper tape to make their flowers light up. Students also made Valentine cards with built-in circuits after learning about different kinds of circuits and the science behind them.

In her lower school STEM classes, Ms. Shah challenged her students to make independent structures using strips of paper. The challenge was that the structure needed to stand on its own and could not be taped, hung or used as a support stand, she said. The students used the paper strips and glue sticks to create paper hearts which they put together to create three-dimensional heart structures which some students used as Valentine’s Day cards.

 “Students rose up to the challenge and created free standing structures,” Ms. Shah said. “The students learned engineering concepts through trial and error. They learned perseverance and how to find solutions by trying different ideas and methods to reach their goal.”

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