It is Engineers Week. Yesterday we saw lots of structures in our locality that engineers have designed.
Recently we have had a lot of storms. Lots of nearby fields are flooded and the sea is very high at the moment. We know that flooding can occur when rain lasts too long or it rains too heavily, or when there is a tsunami, or when a high tide and a storm/strong winds occur at the same time.
The Lifeboat service in Galway do an amazing job, the volunteers save lives every year.
We put our STEM skills to good use and designed our own flood defences.
This included: Working in teams to design a flood barrier. Costing materials and working within a budget. Buying the supplies. Constructing the flood barrier.
Next came the most exciting part of all: Testing out our flood defences. Our LEGO man had to survive a sudden flood!
We used all our skills of curiosity, questioning, problem solving, predicting, creating, collaborating, communicating, critical thinking, evaluating, finding information, offering explanations for our findings.
We enjoyed learning about and using all we know from Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.
We really enjoyed this task. We had a great discussion on the benefits and downfalls of each of the different materials and their suitability as good flood defences. We can understand what an important job it is being an engineer and we felt each of us could become a good engineer in the future.
