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STEM project: Retrieve a planetary landing shuttle

January 13, 2016 Ticia 9 Comments

Yesterday for our bit of homeschool science we made planetary landing shuttles.  But we can’t just leave them on the planet.  We need to be able to retrieve the planetary landing shuttles.  This made for a great problem-solving STEM project.

STEM project planetary landing shuttle

 (good chance there are affiliate links in here)

Supplies needed for retrieving a planetary landing shuttle STEM project

your planetary landing shuttle from yesterday, building supplies, yarn, rope, hooks (my kids used broken hangers)

Requirements for retrieving planetary landing shuttle

As before I used a rubric (on my subscriber page, join my newsletter) to let them know what they had to do.  It was fairly straightforward on this project:

  • Is there a way to “pick up” the shuttle?
  • did anything fall out of the shuttle as it was retrieved
  • did you successfully retrieve the shuttle

Designed our retrieval system

As the kids worked on their retrieval systems and their shuttles, they realized their shuttles would need some revisions.  None of them had a way to be picked up by any sort of retrieval system, and most of them would have materials falling out as they were pulled back up.

Design and test their planetary shuttle retrieval system

So, back to the drawing board, they went.  Batman ended up adding a latch to his storage bay, and when that wasn’t secure enough went with the engineer solution of “add more duct tape”.  Princess went with the brute force method and taped a broken hanger to her shuttle giving her a big huge way to hook her shuttle.

Testing our retrieval systems


As before we dropped our shuttles to simulate how they would have landed, because there’s no guarantee it would land the way we wanted.

planetary landing shuttle retrieval system test

Then we took turns trying to pick up and retrieve the landing shuttles.

It was quite fun to try and everyone agreed it was a lot harder than it looked.

STEM project retrieve your planetary landing shuttle on your own

Tomorrow we design our planetary rovers out of LEGOS

If you’re still wanting more astronomy posts check out our astronomy page or my astronomy pinterest board.

planetary landing shuttle retrieval astronomy 4th

science 4th grade, astronomy, engineering

Comments

  1. Phyllis at All Things Beautiful says

    January 13, 2016 at 7:27 am

    I am really enjoying these rovers posts. Very cool and inventive activities. Really makes them think.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      January 13, 2016 at 8:12 am

      It really did, and it was so much fun for me to watch them think.

  2. maryanne @ mama smiles says

    January 13, 2016 at 6:21 pm

    This looks like a very fun project!

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      January 13, 2016 at 9:39 pm

      It was so much fun when we did it this summer!

  3. claire says

    January 18, 2016 at 12:41 am

    These are such great activities and fab STEM learning!

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      January 19, 2016 at 7:42 am

      Thanks! It was so much fun to do!

  4. Natalie PlanetSmartyPants says

    January 18, 2016 at 2:53 pm

    This cracks me up! Adding more duct tape is an excellent engineering solution for many problems 😀

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      January 19, 2016 at 7:42 am

      Yes it is, it certainly is a common solution in my house.

    • Ticia says

      January 19, 2016 at 7:42 am

      Yes it is, it certainly is a common solution in my house.

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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