Student Council

St. James Student Council has been hard at work getting ready for the Halloween Spooktacular.

The 3D Experience

We had a great first meeting for our 3D Experience Club!  Students worked together on their first task: creating Saint James themed key chains.  Our plans are to print designs, sell them to students, and use the money raised to donate to a local organization.  Stay tuned to see our amazing creations!

Grades K - 2 Craft Club

Halloween Hedgehogs

Grades K - 2 Craft Club made Halloween Hedgehogs.  They used small muscle coordination skills as they placed pipe cleaners all around a Styrofoam Egg. Fun was had by all!

Crazy 8's Math Club

The students in Math Club built 3D shapes (polyhedrons) with glowsticks and Styrofoam balls.  Individually they built pyramids and cubes.  In groups they were challenged to make a 3D shape with pentagons for sides, which is called a dodecahedron.  This was quite the challenge.  Afterward, Math Club had free time to explore what else they could build with their teams.  We ended our club session with building pentagonal prisms that the students took home.  Geometry and engineering can be fun!

Robotics Sept 2018

SJS Robotics, Sept. 2018

Our SJS Robotics team is hard at work! Our competition is Nov. 15 and we have plenty of work to do getting ready.

We begin all of our meetings with a team building activity. This gives the students a chance to practice working together creatively. This week, the team was challenged to make a tower using just newspaper and masking tape. The tower was supposed to be more than 12 inches and strong enough to hold a heavy book. The team took it to a higher level!

 

Sometimes we need to make repairs to our mission models. Our robot was supposed to drive over the "craters" and push on the bar, but the robot broke the bar instead. Luckily, Legos can be easily fixed.

The students are brainstorming ways that the robot can collect "core samples" from one area of the robot field.

Next, they are writing down the individual steps that the robot will take in completing the task.

In addition to building a robot, our team will propose a solution to a real world problem. The topic this year is long term space exploration. Our team is doing background research on Mars and learning about all of the challenges that astronauts will encounter during a Mars mission.

The team is building different styles of forklift and will test them to see which one will work best for the robot missions.