The focus for this nine weeks will be on simple machines (in science). From the Native Americans that first settled Texas to the pioneering 3-D software of today, simple machines helped create an influence as big as the state that continues in ways we may not always recognize.
All year long, students will realize that everything complex follows from everything simple—and does so logically.

Students will construct a series of catapults both virtual and real that are based on the simple machines studied in science class. Students will use the scientific method to demonstrate their understanding of force and motion by adjusting variables within a virtual physics simulation. They will then compare these results to a real-world experiment to express an opinion about the accuracy and limitation of the virtual environment.

English’s beginnings require a foundation in the formula of short stories. Students will “connect” plot curves and the elements of literature—foundations of literature—to stories from the literature text and then to their own life stories, concluding with a composition from each of them modeled after the simple story-building model, a narration or story paper about their individual catapult experiences.

Social studies students will come to understand that by ignoring history, we tend to overlook its significance. Students will first connect the importance of the geography of Texas to its colonization and how simple machines helped early settlers succeed and thrive. This information will be used to create a timeline that measures progress in various industries (e.g., oil, cotton, ranching, government, and defense). Each student will produce an example of a brochure for tourists promoting a Texas county.

Students will incorporate knowledge of number sense, order of operations and the relationships between fractions, decimals, and percents, and use the investigations of simple machines, gather data from the catapult exercises, and convert that information into fractions, decimals, and percents as a real-world exercise. Each student will alter his or her execution of the catapult experiment by reconfiguring the original design to create a better outcome (a more accurate distance) and then illustrate the rate of change on a percent bar.

In science students will investigate force and motion and energy transfer as well as various types of simple machines (pulleys, levers, screws, wheels and axles, and wedges). Students will also use the scientific method to make predictions based on prior knowledge to design, construct, and test a catapult for use in a class competition.

In technology class, we'll simulate the catapult being tested in science class using the physics engine built into the Blender animation program. Students will contstruct a virtual catapult that behaves like the model being tested in science. Students will test the accuracy of the virtual data against the data collected in science class