STEM Family Free Night at The ICM

If you can’t join us on the last Friday of the month for free museum admission and a STEM activity, check out these activities you can do at home to learn about STEM concepts!

“STEM literacy is a person’s ability to apply his or her understanding of how the world works within the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math. It does not simply mean achieving literacy in these areas individually. Rather, STEM literacy refers to the ability to investigate and question these facets of the world in an interdisciplinary manner.”

– Adapted from the 2011 Iowa STEM Roadmap: A Strategic Plan for STEM Education • www.iowaSTEM.org

Magnification

For this month’s STEM FFN challenge, we are partnering with the University of Iowa Health Care to explore STEM in health care! Follow along as we learn about magnification and how it works in this edition of Virtual STEM FFN. 

Materials Needed

• Plastic water bottle
• Marker
• Scissors
• Water (or other kinds of liquids!)
• Magnifying Glass Worksheet (click to download)

Pumpkin Tower

We are celebrating the upcoming holiday with a special Halloween-themed STEM challenge. Let’s use recycled materials (or whatever you have hanging around) to create a tower that supports pumpkins! Gather your items (listed below) and tune in this Friday on Facebook and Instagram at 6 pm to do the activity with us.

• Tape
• Cardstock
• Straws
• Scissors
• Other loose parts (like cutting boards, cups, wood blocks)

Wind Powered Vehicles

For our September Virtual STEM Family Free Night, we’re celebrating our upcoming FREE event, Move It! Dig It! Do It! Drive Thru Truck Zoo by engineering something that moves through the power of wind!

Activity

Robots

We’re partnering with the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library to provide you with robot-themed STEM challenges!

The word “robot” is drawn from an old Slavic word, robota. A robot is an autonomous machine capable of sensing its environment, carrying out computations to execute a function, and performing actions in the real world. Robots are a diverse bunch!

Activity

Take to the Skies

Leonardo da Vinci depicted the idea of a parachute in his writings in the late 1400s, but the idea was not designed, built and tested until the late 1700s. 

Activity

Chain Reactions

A chain reaction is a series of reactions to one event. It’s the foundation to many Rube Goldberg machines. We are going to break down the mechanisms of it and create one of our very own using simple machines. Are you up for the challenge?

Activity