🔎 Project information
- Project name: How to build a rocket big enough for us all?
- Service: Kozy Kids Childcare, Glenside
- Award: South Australia Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
- Frequency: Daily for 1 month
- Number of children: 16
- Age of children: 3-6 years
💥 Project Summary
Inspired by reading a book about the planets, the children began asking questions about outer space. Conversations and play soon shifted to a strong focus on rocket ships. One child asked, ‘’How many boxes would it take for us to build a rocket all of us could fit in?’’, which kickstarted conservations around the broader question: “How can we build a rocket big enough for us all?” This formed the basis of the children’s project, which explored various methods for building their rocket by comparing which materials worked best.
💡 Collecting Ideas
The children had lots of questions and hypotheses related to how to make a rocket ship big enough for all of them to fit inside. For example: What can we build the rocket out of? What can we use to stick the rocket together? What are planets? What’s a solar system? What do astronauts’ eat? What does a rocket ship look like? How high can we build the rocket and still feel safe in our rocket?
They also questioned what shape was best for a rocket and thought about what materials were needed. To collect the necessary materials, the educators supported the children to ask what materials might be available in the other rooms of their service as well as at their sister services. They asked them to collect boxes for their project and educators also engaged families to donate secondhand keyboards and technical items. The children decided where their rocket ship would be built and closely monitored their collection of resources prior to starting construction.
🧪 Experimenting
The children decided that cardboard boxes would be the main building material and the children carefully inspected and selected which ones would be added to their prototype. They slotted boxes together based on size or shape. Other building materials were explored and reviewed, including masking tape and glue. They investigated which worked better at keeping the rocket ship together.
During the construction period, one child asked “Would tape work better going vertically rather than horizontally?” when she noticed boxes coming apart where the tape ran horizontally. This critical question caught all the children’s attention and led to rebuilding the rocket again.
Once the walls of the rocket had been constructed, the children noticed that the rocket was missing a roof. This led to them to questioning whether or not they needed a roof. A consensus emerged that a roof was not indeed needed, which allowed the children to focus on finalising the interior of their rocket ship. At the end of the construction period, one child asked “Why can’t our rocket ship fly?”, which then led to more rich research and exploration into the reasons.
SA Winner: Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
This project was the 2024 SA Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Award as part of the Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards. These biennial awards call upon early learning services and classrooms to nominate by submitting an inquiry-based STEM project co-developed with their children 0-8 years. Projects were judged on originality, STEM content, alignment to the inquiry cycle, child-led approach, and use of a gender lens.