The Cowles Cardboard Sled Derby Combines Snow and Science
The Cowles Cardboard Sled Derby
Take some cardboard and duct tape and – voila – it’s the ingredients for both a lesson in science as well as a half-way decent sled.
Cowles Montesorri teacher Heather Anderson, a finalist to be this year’s Iowa Teacher of the Year, organized students in the after-school science club at Cowles to hold a Cardboard Sled Derby.
Teams of 2-4 students were organized to build and race their sleds using only the following materials:
- Cardboard
- Cardboard rolls
- Duct tape
- Paint
- Wax (for the bottom of the sled)
With those ingredients, plus a hill covered in snow, Ms. Anderson helped students better understand several basic science concepts:
- The Cowles Cardboard Sled Derby
- How to take accurate measurements of distance and time;
- The idea that potential energy is stored energy (the sled/team at the top of the hill) and that kinetic energy is the energy of mass and motion (the sled/team going downhill);
- The forces that slow a sled/team as it goes downhill, such as drag against the air and friction against the ground;
Students are writing about the results of the Carboard Sled Derby in their science journals, recording the different physical variables their team faced such as friction, acceleration, and mass in relation to distance and speed traveled.
The cardboard sled project was not the only lesson in the snow for Cowles students. They also learned about the 6,000 year history of the use of snow shoes, and got a first-hand lesson with their own attempts at snowshoeing.
