RAF 100 - STEM Activities

RAF 100 – Aiming for Awesome! 

Over the course of the Autumn Term, the children of Class 2 have completed a range of STEM activities, using resources provided by the Royal College of Engineers in a pack entitled, ‘RAF100 – Aiming for Awesome’. These activities involved learning more about some of the activities of the RAF and completing a range of STEM activities linked to these. In one of these activities, the children made code-breakers, which they used to decipher and encode secret messages. In another activity, the children used an electronic paper plane launcher to test and improve their own paper plane designs, considering what makes a plane ‘aerodynamic’. Another activity involved learning about radar and designing and building radar towers from paper art straws. Later, the children learned about speed records that break the sound barrier and practised calculating speed from distances and times or time taken from speed and distance. They then created a ‘vortex cannon’ which was able to extinguish a candle from a distance away and they carried out tests to see how far away each vortex cannon had to be from the flame in order to blow it out. At the end of term, a final challenge involved using a rocket launcher to send plastic bottles high into the air. Working in pairs, the children were then challenged to design and make an ejector seat for a parachutist to send a toy parachute (complete with plastic paratrooper) high above the school, with the aim that it should safely land back down to earth to be used in the next test. Many of these activities supported this term’s Science work on Forces and the RAF 100 theme provided a useful link between History work on the World Wars and the decades since those wars and other areas of the curriculum.