AIRPLANE SCIENCE

by Kerri Consalvo | Jun 27, 2022 | Uncategorized

Engineering is a HUGE part of our curriculum here at Phoenix. It provides the opportunity for curiosity and exploration through design, experimenting, building, testing, and trialing.  

Each team or individual designed their own airplane, based on the challenge they wanted their plane to go through. First, we brainstormed ideas as a whole school.

Some challenges were to see how far the plane would fly, what height it achieved, how long it stayed in the air, and how many flips it could do.

We experimented with an app called Wind Tunnel to experiment with different shapes, aerodynamics, and wind flow.

For the older students, it was a mathematical challenge to figure out the speed of their airplane. They used testing tables and documented their data after each flight so that they could learn from their mistakes and create better designs.

For the final day of Adventure Week… 

by Kerri Consalvo | Jun 15, 2022 | Uncategorized

I lead the Phoenix Kids in an animation workshop. Animation is my passion and my main artistic focus, and I really wanted to share my love for animation with the students. We used flip books to let the kids play and experiment with animation as an art form, the same way I did when I was little. My initial idea was to have them all start by making an animation of a bouncing ball so they could get the hang of using a flip book and learn how to animate something simple, before doing more complicated animations. I expected a lot of creativity and artistic ability from the kids, but I was shocked by how creative and driven the kids were.

The younger kids mainly focused on making a bouncing ball, and then coloring it and making a background, learning a simple animation while still expressing their creativity. The older kids were awesome, helping to teach the younger kids how to draw in a flipbook, and being really creative with the things they animated. They animated steam coming off a cup, a rocket taking off, an astronaut, and much more. It was really exciting to see how much the students loved to learn and express themselves through art and animation, and I was especially excited by how many of them had done animation with flipbooks before.

The Phoenix School has clearly fostered the same creativity and love of learning in its students that I treasure so much from my own early education. I’m excited to see what these kids do as they grow up, they’ve been well prepared for a good future. If kids with a passion for making animation keep practicing they’ll make for amazing animators, and lovely people to work with in the future.

Cassandra, Montserrat Intern