Lucerne Valley Virtual Academy students and family members recently put together the Crunchlabs' Domino Catapult project. Photo by Peter Day
While in-person school has been in full force for several years since the pandemic ended, Lucerne Valley Unified School District still offers a distance learning option, the Lucerne Valley Virtual Academy. On most days, students are learning and interacting with academy teachers on their computers remotely, but once a week students and their families gather at the physical classrooms located adjacent to the Lucerne Unified School District offices to participate in hands-on learning projects.
On November 20th, the LV Virtual Academy community came together to learn about engineering by putting together the recent kit by Crunchlabs, the STEM-education company specializing in do-it-yourself gadgets. The lesson began with K-6 teacher Mary Eller, who shares virtual academy teaching duties with 7-12 teacher Cindy Lazenby, distributing the kits and followed by giving a brief explanation of the project. Then Mrs. Eller played an instructional video featuring former NASA engineer Mark Rober, who has nearly 60 million YouTube subscribers, walking the students through the construction of the Domino Catapult project.
A catapult is a device that first was used in battle. Without the use of gunpowder or other propellants, a catapult could propel an object such as a stone toward an enemy by utilizing stored energy with the assistance of a rope and spring that was pulled back. The students’ kits, however, were used for a fun STEM project that teaches about physics, specifically the rate of speed of objects and how that speed varies, depending on several factors.
Each kit comes with two catapult projects, a booklet and a how-to video. When completed, the miniature catapult sends a red foam ball to wherever the device is pointed. The second device can be used to bounce the ball into several directions.
As was typical at the Lucerne Valley Virtual Academy, this in-person day was a family affair with parents, siblings or grandparents participating in the highly participatory lesson. The classroom quickly became a veritable Santa’s Workshop with all ages, with looks of concentration on their faces, carefully putting together their projects. Some student teams were able to complete their project within minutes. Others took most of the 1-1/2-hour class to finish the Domino Catapult kit. When each project was completed, fun ensued as the students demonstrated their STEM physics lesson with enthusiasm.
