A WEIGHTY PROBLEM

A Weighty Problem is a freely available elementary STEM+CT instructional unit developed by the Smithsonian Science Education Center with funding from the US Department of Defense STEM office. As part of the Smithsonian Science for Computational Thinking series, it is designed to address a bundle of science, engineering, mathematics, and computational thinking standards from the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core Mathematics Standards, the Computer Science Teachers Association Standards, and the ISTE student standards. In this unit, students:

• Construct and revise an argument about the effect of mixing water and powder on the weight of the materials
• Plan, write, debug, and conduct an investigation procedure about whether the weight of a powder disappears when it is mixed into water
• Use patterns from a visual representation of class data as evidence to support a claim
• Identify the important parts of the story about why and how they learned whether the weight of a powder disappears when it is mixed into water and create a storyboard using these story elements
• Create and debug an animation that uses events, sequences, loops, and/or conditions to communicate how they learned that the weight of a powder does not disappear when mixed into water
   

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Below are additional resources that support teaching this unit.