October 17, 2006
The new LEGO Science and Technology set has a model that measures with a trundle wheel.
Each of these students hypothesized about if the car would go farther with a weight.
Then tested out their hypothesis.
The real reason we were working with trundle is to do a unit on perimeter.
A wooden trundle wheel could be used to find large distances that one might walk.
The Duplo Early Machine sets have a measuring model.
I made something similar from the Motorized Simple Machine sets.
Two of the schools today have those sets in their rooms.
Doing the math was as much fun as building the trundles and rolling them around tables and the room.
One rotation of the indicator was measured and that number multiplied by the number of rotations.
Some students decided to use centimeters and some decided to use inches.
Afterwards we converted each answer to the other unit
and found that the measuring job was nicely accurate.
One teacher from the next school had been to the Duplo at Pullman.
Old ideas and new ideas
