Join students Sophie, Tomás, Emma, and Marcus during Fifth Period! This STEM comic strip chronicles the exciting and often hilarious adventures of a close-knit group of four friends as they learn about science, technology, engineering, and math from their kooky, inspiring, off-the-wall science teacher, Mr. Kepler. When they're not in class, these kids love to explore the vast world of STEM on their own, launching weather balloons, programming computer games, and cataloging insects, sometimes with unpredictable and highly entertaining results!
Check back on the first and third Friday of every month for a new Fifth Period strip!
Emma’s Engineering Accident
Emma is quite the opportunistic inventor—when her automatic cake-making venture didn’t pan out, she saw it as a happy accident and figured out that her machine could do something much simpler (with an equally delicious end result): pancakes! This is hardly a half-baked way to engineer something; in fact, a lot of notable inventions were discovered by accident. Think about the microwave—it’s something almost every home has these days, but those little machines actually have their roots in World War II radar technology. Can you believe the same technology you’ve used to pop popcorn was once used to find enemy submarines?! All it took was for brilliant machinist Percy Spencer to notice something weird when he walked in front of a magnetron. Read more about the discovery.
Think about it!
Learn more about other accidental inventions like Velcro, safety glass, matches, x-rays, pacemakers, and even Post-it notes. How many of these things do you use every day? How would your life be different without them?
And the next time you’re working on something and things don’t turn out quite the way you expected, don’t be too quick to start over or give up—instead, think about whether what you ended up with could be applied to something else. Your “mistake” might end up changing the world!