Snow Day STEM Learning

Occasionally, when all the winter weather aligns, my kiddos and I find ourselves home during a winter storm without the ability to venture out until the snow plows rescue us from the blizzard. Today was such a day.

During my lunch break, my 8-year-old brought me his broken self-stirring mug, asking if it was fixable. My response was, "What's the worst we can do at this point?" We began disassembly, then more disassembly, then cleaning.

The diagnosis was a seized motor. The only logical next step? Consult YouTube. We found a great tutorial by a knowledgeable young man and applied what we learned.

After a few applications of the miraculous liquid known as WD-40, we had movement.

Drunk on our success, we assembled the cup a little too quickly and disconnected the ground wire. Daddy came to the rescue with a quick solder job and we were back in business. Now #8 was the proud owner of a refurbished self-stirring mug and a renewed interest in engineering.

The problem? We had no chocolate syrup to make chocolate milk. A glance at the roads showed they were still too iffy to venture out. We googled recipes only to discover we were also out of sugar. No Googly configuration yielded a recipe that did not include some sort of granulated sugar.

However, modern problems call for modern solutions, and we turned to ChatGPT. I explained my situation to my friendly chatbot, and he bounded to the rescue. You can see our end results here:

When life hands you a snow day, make chocolate milk!

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