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This year we are using the OpenSciEd curriculum. This curriculum gives teachers the materials, support, and power to get kids excited and curious about the world around them and confident in their ability to figure it out through questioning, investigating, and solving problems. We will use these materials for the unit on chemical reactions and energy: How can we use chemical reactions to design a solution to a problem? Students are introduced to the anchoring phenomenon—a flameless heater in a Meal, Ready-to-Eat that provides hot food to people by just adding water. Students explore the inside of a flameless heater, then do investigations to collect evidence to support the idea that this heater and another type of flameless heater, a hand warmer, are undergoing chemical reactions as they get warm. Students will develop their design solutions by investigating how much food and reactants they should include in their homemade heater designs and go through a series of iterative testing and redesigning. This iterative design cycle includes peer feedback, consideration of design modification consequences, and analysis of impacts on stakeholders. Finally, students optimize their designs and have another team test their homemade heater instructions.
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