Fourth graders continued their exploration of flower structure and function and learned about plant reproduction, namely, pollination and fertilization.

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This week we went through a lot of different demos revealing two human weaknesses: (1) we miss a lot of what goes on around us, and (2) we are typically bad at estimating how much miss. 

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This Monday we focused on the concepts Kinetic energy and Potential energy, and working with velocity and acceleration equations.

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This Monday we worked on using our experimental data from the week before to optimize our catapults. We discussed the concept of variables and the value of minimizing variables in experimentation. We also discussed the importance of recording and analyzing experimental data.

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This week we focused on sleep. We learned a bit about each other's sleep habits (how many hours of sleep we typically get; how difficult it is to fall sleep; whether it's difficult to wake up in the mornings; whether we wake up in the middle of the night; whether we can remember our dreams). We learned how much sleep humans typically get over the life span, and how much sleep different animals get (squirrels sleep a surprising amount) … and a whole lot more.

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At Cogitania’s Saturday Botany workshop fourth graders and the instructor reviewed a list of the Botanical vocabulary covered since we began the Botany workshop series in 2016. The student’s understanding of these terms was impressive!

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We reviewed our progress from the last weeks by generating a bit of pseudo code for our simulation and highlighting the high level objectives and methods we were building our code around. Here's a cleaned up and augmented record of what we want for our solar system simulation, including some new logic on collisions we built up together over the session

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At Cogitania’s Saturday Botany workshop fourth graders learned about how plants protect themselves from predators. Plants can't run away from danger like animals can, so they have developed their own defenses to protect themselves.

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We started by understanding the ordinary differential equations of Newton's law using our intuitions about traveling in a car, some algebra, and geometry. 

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