Boyden Elementary School – STEM Field Trip 7 (’18-’19)

On Friday, November 9th, 60 fifth grade students from the Boyden Elementary School in Walpole came to visit Northeastern. The day revolved around a theme of Engineering, starting off with an introduction to engineering and the design process. The students participated in the Reverse Egg Drop activity in the morning, where they were tasked with developing a device that would safely catch a falling egg using a limited pool of resources. The students developed a handful of crafty ideas, including using pipe cleaners as shock absorbing material.

After lunch the students built catapults from popsicle sticks, tape, rubber bands, and a spoon. The students had three testing rounds where they earn points depending upon their accuracy and are given time between rounds to make improvements based on their results. All of the catapults were very impressive. The student design teams had the best scores thus far (normally only 10% of groups earn any amount of points whereas today 90% of groups had more than 1 point)! The volunteers were also tasked with developing their own catapult with an added level of complexity — they collaborated to construct a double fulcrum catapult.

Volunteers = Francheska, Sakura, Michael, Marissa, Jameson, Matthew, Kurt

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