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How to use extension resources at Esplora
Choose from our exhibit-aligned extension activities to encourage your students to engage more deeply with exhibits and continue to explore the topics even after leaving Esplora.
We provide suggestions for pre-visit activities to prepare your students, on-site activity guides to use at Esplora, and post-visit activities to provide opportunities to make use of what they have learned and further scope for learning and practicing 21st-Century skills.
We suggest that you pick and mix from these activities according to your curricular needs – perhaps you want the entire class to perform a particular pre or post visit activity, although only 1 small group will actually be doing the on-site activity.
Planning your class on-site activities
We recommend setting aside the first 5 minutes of your class time in a gallery to conduct a brief investigation, and then allowing the students to put away their pens and papers and continue to engage with the rest of the exhibits.
Self-guided exploration is very engaging and holds great personal significance, so this should be given importance rather than having the students spend all their gallery time in guided activity. For this reason, the on-site activity guides that we have developed are designed to take up to 5 minutes of engaging with the exhibit, followed by post-visit extension activities which can take place at school or at home, and we do not recommend having students do more than one guided activity each per gallery unless it is a repeat visit.
You can divide your class into small groups before arriving at Esplora, and assign a different exhibit per gallery to each group. In this way each small group will do 5 minutes of investigation in each of the 3 galleries that you visit, but still get to spend 25 minutes per gallery interacting with all the other exhibits.
Post-visit extension activities
You can further extend the activity by having each group present their results to the entire class. They can do this after completing the extension activities, or else present only their initial results from the gallery, and all students can then do the extension activity for the group’s assignment. We recommend providing the students with the opportunity to present their work to their peers, as public speaking is fast becoming an essential skill for STEM professions. You may choose to assign the extension material as a combination of homework and classwork according to your curricular needs, and possibly collaborate with other teachers of other subjects which may relate to the activities.
Integrating subjects
Esplora follows the STEAM ethos in that we believe in integrating the Arts into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and therefore the extension activities will include links to the humanities as well as to the sciences.
These activities are an excellent opportunity to foster 21st-Century skills in students:
Learning skills: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication
Literacy skills: information literacy, media literacy, technology literacy
Life skills: flexibility, leadership, productivity skills, social skills
Activity resources
- Hall of Motion (coming soon)
- Optics Gallery (coming soon)
- Hall of Eco-Life (coming soon)
- Electricity & Magnetism Gallery (coming soon)
- Engineering / Media / Chemistry Gallery
- Music / Illusion Gallery (coming soon)
Engineering Gallery
Here are resources to use with our Engineering Gallery
Exhibit: Stronger Shapes
These activities support topics associated with the “Stronger Shapes” Exhibit. Choose the appropriate age group for your students, and have a look at the age groups above and below for additional activities you might find helpful for students requiring more or less support than their peers.
Age group: Middle School
These activities are for use before, during and after your visit to Esplora. We encourage the development of 21st-Century skills such as critical thinking and digital literacy.
Student activities
Structural Engineers often join together lots of short beams instead of of using fewer long beams when building structures like bridges and platforms – this is called a truss. The force of the weight flows through the short beams and down to the supporting base.
Pre-visit activities
Activity: Investigate the strength of different shapes using any materials (e.g. bamboo skewers or lollipop sticks, joined using rubber bands or tape)
Each straight piece of material is called an element, and each point where you join them is called a joint. When you join more than 2 elements at the same joint, this is called a node.
Make simple shapes out of your materials: squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons etc
Which shapes are more stable (less likely to collapse when you push on them) than others? Are shapes with more elements more or less likely to collapse?
Can you stabilise these shapes by adding elements to cross-brace? What shapes have your cross-braces now made? E.g. adding a diagonal cross-brace to a rectangle forms two isosceles triangles
What is the most stable structure you can make, with the least amount of elements? Hold a competition to test each other’s structures – which is the most stable? Which has the least amount of elements?
Based on your research with your elements, what do you think is the most stable shape that can be made using straight elements?
Write a short report that shows at least 3 shapes and what happened when you tested them – use photos or drawings to illustrate the report.
Activity: Learn about nuts and bolts and how we use them to join elements together
Look up videos that explain what bolts are and what nuts are, and how they work together. Make sure this includes butterfly nuts. How are bolts made by hand on a lathe? How are they made in a factory?
If you have or can borrow a Meccano set, spend some time building shapes – what are some good and bad points about using bolts and nuts? Compare them to other ways of fastening, for example glue, rope, tape, nails or rivets.
Choose a good video or make a short playlist to recommend to your teacher for other students wanting to learn about nuts and bolts.
Here’s a video we thought was interesting and funny: Fasteners: Machine Screws and Bolts
On-site activity at Esplora
1. Join two triangles with nuts and bolts to make a square platform
2. Make a base that raises the platform off the ground to at least the height of this paper.
3. Can you make it strong enough in 5 minutes to support the weight of a person without collapsing? Use what you learned from your research into elements and shapes.
4. Document your work – draw a diagram and/or take photos with a camera
Extension activities
Use your research into elements and your activity at Esplora to write a short article explaining elements, joints, nuts and bolts, and how to use them to build structures. Illustrate your article using the diagrams and photos you created.
Give examples of structures that use trusses, like the Forth bridge in Scotland and the Integrated Truss Structure of the International Space Station. What do you think about these structures?
Submit your article to be published as a blog post on your class or school blog, or turn it into a video or a powerpoint presentation to share in class.
Send a copy of your work to programmes@esplora.org.mt, we’d love to see it!