Year 5 Science maze building

This term the Year 5 students were learning about forces. The students completed a design and make project where they were required to design and build a maze which would make a ping-pong ball roll the slowest down a maze. In Week 8 all groups tested their mazes. Students were given two trial runs, then were allowed to make adjustments and run their final maze. We were impressed with the variety of Maze designs and the strategies used to slow down the ping-pong ball. Congratulations to all the Year 5 students for your collaboration and amazing maze designs.

At the start of the term,in Science we started making a maze. The goal was not to go fast, but to go slow. It was called ‘Slow Maze Runners’. My group and I changed our design a lot of times and came up with a design with a record time of 6 seconds.  When we were making the design, we had to make adjustments along the way to make it slower. When we first tried it, it went for 3 seconds, so we had to make changes to slow it down. On testing day I became very stressed because ours started to break. We had so much fun making this maze.

Lily D

This term in Science we have been focusing on making a slow maze runner using our knowledge of friction. The goal of this task was to make a slow mase run so that our ball takes that maximum time to finish. My group started to brainstorm different ideas that would take up lots of time. Our ideas contained a funnel, a board with spikes and a tunnel with things sticking out of the sides. Once we made all of the pieces we assembled our mase and gave it a test. For the remainder of that lesson we made adjustments to make it as long and as slow as possible. My group’s slowest time recorded was 5 seconds and 47 milliseconds which made us the third highest time in our class.

Alegra C

At the start of the term for our Science lessons, year 5 created ‘Slow Maze Runners’ (ball runs). The aim was to create the slowest ball run using different techniques. My group added a funnel, a board with bits of paper on it to slow down the ball, ramps with twists and turns and more. This was a fun task and our group ended up coming third, with a time of 5.47(5 seconds and 47 milliseconds). This task helped me with my thinking skills, collaboration skills and being able to slow down an object by using different steps/methods combined(this task gives a deeper understanding of gravity).

Sienna P