Crest Awards Kick Off for Science Club
This week we started the CREST Award in Science Club, and completed the first challenge – Crafty Rafts!
A scheme that inspires young people to think and behave like scientists and engineers, CREST offers students the opportunity to learn through hands-on challenges, exploring the world around them.
Students from Years 7 and 8 worked towards achieving their SuperStar CREST Award by attempted to build Crafty Rafts with a range of very simple materials. The young engineers were provided with sellotape, masking tape, staples and just one piece of A4 paper, all of which had to be transformed into a raft that would be capable of holding marbles – without sinking! Students weren’t allowed to cut the paper, so creative folding…unfolded (sorry)!
Through the very clever use of sellotape as a waterproof material, one particular group build a raft capable of holding 148 marbles; a single piece of paper, waterproofed and folded to create a raft able to hold this enormous amount of weight. Not only was this a magnificent creation and achievement, but it was about double the weight last year’s best raft was able to hold.
Two other teams got well over 50 marbles in theirs, and another one got nearly 120, but alas the goalposts had been shifted!
Did you know? The first rubber raft was made by Lt. John Fremont and Horace H. Day believed to be built it the 1840s. They planned to survey the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Although invented back then, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that the first commercial rafting trip took place.
