#babipurSTEM – Cross Sections
The challenge this fortnight is simple. Show us your best cross section. We want to make a guessing game of this challenge and have fun seeing if we can figure out your cross sections and match them up to well known and not so well know Babipur goodies! We’d love it if you got your little ones involved and see if they could guess some or even get stuck in with figuring other people’s posts out.
What is a Cross Section?
A cross section is the shape or outline of an object at different points through the object. For example a classic Klean Kanteen bottle would have a cross section of a circle.
Looking at cross sections encourages lateral thinking and spacial awareness in children. Twisting perspective forces them to think visually to imagine what they are looking at. It’s a brilliant educational way to help them learn and nurture creative thinking.
Cross sections are used in day to day life for lots of different careers. It is essential in engineering for schematics, useful skill for architects and is a life saving skill when applied to map reading. Perfect for all those future innovators we’re trying to raise!
CT Scanners
A great way to demonstrate Cross Sections is with a CT Scanner. Now obviously we appreciate that you won’t have access to one of these, but it’s a fantastic visual on showing you some Babipur goodies in a way you’ve never seen them before!
CT Scanners take pictures of objects (usually people) in lots of slices. It’s more commonly used for medical diagnosis but occasionally an opportunity to stick a Nin in one presents itself and we tried to make the most of it!
An object moves through a CT Scanner horizontally and you can get up to thousands of images or ‘slices’ along the way.
We had lots of fun with our children getting them to guess what we’d put through the CT Scanner. It was not as obvious as we had first thought and we’re not ashamed to admit we struggled with a few!
CT Scanners work by detecting differences in materials, so this meant not all our of toys were well suited to being scanned. This eerie image of an Ambrosius Flower Fairy lying down was declared ‘creepy’ by one of our boys! We agreed it was slightly sinister, as the detector could only pick out the wire frame for the 2 arms!
When compared to this shot of the Kabloom Seedbom, which came out in much more detail, it was immediately obvious which item this was. The scanner was able to detect the cardboard sleeve, the compostable shell as well as the varying densities of the seeds contained therein.
To be honest we weren’t entirely sure what we were going to get when we put some of our toys through the CT Scanner and we were pleasantly surprised with the thousands of images we got as the outcome. Rather fascinatingly the wooden pieces were amazing as you could see the patterns of the wood grain ‘move’ through each slice. We particularly loved the Gluckskafer Grotto as there was a fabulous knot in the middle we were able to see twist and change as it moved along through the scanner.
Our personal favourite was the Grimms Bowls. This totally confused our children as a 2D sliced image made them look quite different to how they do in reality. You could literally see on their faces the moment they worked it out. We made a few stop motion videos with the images and you can see clearly the points with which the bowls move through the scanner and stack themselves up before your eyes.
Whilst we had access to a CT Scanner and a highly trained Medical Physicist we couldn’t resist having a closer look at the Klean Kanteen range in more detail. We use these every day so our children were fairly confident they could recognise them without a struggle.
We set up a game for them and had them guess which KK was which. They narrowed it down by figuring out which lid was on each bottle, which helped them visualise which specific KK it was. They were somewhat scuppered with the Tumbler due to its tapered shape (and lack of easily identifiable lid!) The two images we gave them were just different sized circles and they couldn’t understand that one image was the top of the tumbler (the widest/largest circle) and the second image was the narrowest part of the tumbler. It was only when we physically put the Tumbler in front of them they were able to process what they were seeing.
How do you enter?
All you have to do is post a picture or video on your public Instagram account or in the Babipur Hangout Group on Facebook showing how you’ve been having fun learning about and showing us Cross Sections. Use the tag #babipurSTEM so we can find your entries and on Instagram don’t forget to tag @babipur too!
Multiple entries are always encouraged and we’ll post some STEMspiration for you over the fortnight. The challenge will run for 2 weeks and entries will count from today up to Wednesday 21st August 2019 at 11am. Both the winner and the next challenge will be announced shortly after.
What’s the prize?
This fortnight the prize is a set of Grimms bowls, in the winner’s choice of in stock colourway. The Grimms Bowls are such a fine example of how open ended toys can be. You can stack them, wear them as hats, build with them, use them on the beach or alongside sensory play. They also make a fantastic hot tub for Nins – just saying!
Make Learning Fun
You can find a blog post >here< explaining the concept of STEM if you’re unfamiliar with the idea. Please feel free to ask us any questions, this challenge is all about having fun whilst exploring a simple theme in an educational way.
We can’t wait to see what you all come up with for this challenge. We love looking through your entries and seeing how you make colourful learning fun with Babipur!
#lovebabipur
