Last week, after taking their final unit test on electricity, eighth graders were tasked with a STEM challenge in which they had to design and create a traffic glove out of red and green LED lights, a coin battery, conductive thread, and copper tape. There were the stipulations they had to keep in mind:
- All red lights needed to come on at the same time.
- All green lights needed to come on at the same time.
- Red and green lights could not come on at the same time.
Other students also got a lot out of the traffic gloves STEM challenge. “I really enjoyed this project,” shares Elsie Trilling ’26. “It was the first project where we were sort of on our own without the help of Ms. Hrastich. At some points it seemed like it was impossible and that the teachers were just tricking us to see how far we’d get. This project was full of trial and error, many errors, but also things that worked which helped us get closer to finally getting it right. I noticed that not a single person gave up when it wasn’t easy and that our whole class figured out how to make it work. This was a reflection on what we could do with our knowledge from the past unit on circuits. When we were first shown what we were going to make, our expressions consisted of many people saying, ‘What? No way!’ Little did we know, the prior knowledge Ms. Hrastich had taught us was more than enough. This project made me realize that even if something seems impossible at first, there’s always something in our knowledge that can help us figure it out. I am very happy we got to do this project, it helped build teamwork with our classmates and it was so much fun working through it and of course finally getting it to work at the end!”
Olivia Hill ’26 also liked the project. “We learned something new while having fun. It was definitely challenging and involved a lot of creative thinking and good communication, thus I thought everyone had lots of fun figuring out the process of making it and they all worked especially well with their partners. Through this project, we learned to never give up no matter how many mistakes are made. In the beginning, our teacher did not provide any detailed guidance, however, we thought about it over a couple of days and eventually succeeded. We learned to think independently and creatively while applying scientific knowledge to this project.”