Students will be grouped into teams. Then each team will create a pathway for their Hexbug to travel. The Hexbug path should be 5 feet from beginning to end and must include two curves, a hill, one bridge and one tunnel. The Hexbug must travel from the beginning to the end without any assistance. Each team will have a timer and will have 20 minutes to design the quickest path they can for their Hexbug.  After the first race teams will have 5 minutes to talk about changes they can make and 5 minutes to make the changes. There will be one final race to see if a different team is able to win.

In this first hands-on lesson in a two part series, students will explore and measure the rate of spherical objects rolling down a ramp. Assessment suggestions and real-life connections are included.

In this interactive second lesson in a two-part series, students explore ramps. They design and create plans for ramps; and then they build, test, evaluate and adjust the make up of the ramps they create to determine the ramp that will allow objects to roll the longest distance. Lesson extensions include probing questions, a Ramp Builders activity sheet, an assessment suggestion and alternative activities using the ramps which include timing the rolling objects, building ramps where items go up, a web link for differentiated learning and real life applcations.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade Science. 

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade Science.

Do the egg drop challenge with Strawbees! Have the students be innovative designers and construct a model for the egg with the Strawbees so when it is dropped, it will not break. The students are learning about force and gravity. Using technology they can gather information to look at how they can develop the best model.

In this activity, students investigate how forces cause changes in the speed or direction of objects. Students will also observe how the amount of change is affected by the amount of force applied.

In this activity, students will experience gravity just like Galileo did during his experiments.

In this activity, students will discover that gravity affects objects as they roll up a ramp.

In this lesson, students test various materials to see which will hit the ground first. They will first discuss with other students what they think will happen and why, then experiment to see if they were right.