Caught in a Web of STEM
While the trees are busy shedding their colourful leaves, spiders are busy decorating our gardens with their magnificent webs for the Halloween season. 🎃👻
Have you ever stopped to admire one? Those delicate threads, woven into intricate patterns, are little engineering marvels!
At STEMful Play, we believe nature is one of the best places to explore and learn. So, we decided to take a closer look at spider webs and discovered just how much STEM hides in them.
And what an adventure it turned out to be!
Start with a Little Research 📚
Before getting our hands messy, we turned to books and Wikipedia to learn more about these eight-legged architects and their webs.
Did you know that not all spiders build the same kind of web? Some create beautiful circular orb webs, while others weave irregular, mesh-like structures. And how about spider silk (or thread)? Certain silk types are remarkably strong for their weight, stretchy and some even sticky!
The more we learned, the more questions we had. Through this mini-research we found the answers to our following questions:
Could we experiment with the stickiness of spider silk?
Is mathematics hidden within those beautiful patterns?
What would happen if we tried building our own webs?
Is the world wide web (internet) somehow related to spider web? If so, how?
Science
We started with the question on how a spider's web is capable of catching and holding a fly without the spider getting trapped in it? We learnt through research that the sticky silk threads are coated with tiny glue-like droplets that help trap the insects. However, not all threads are sticky. Additionally, spiders tend to have a coating that prevents them from sticking. So, our first activity was to identify the parts of an orb-web that were sticky and the parts that were non-sticky. Our 5 year old used her fine motor skills and utter focus (the challenge given to her was not to destroy the web) to gently probe the orb-web and mark the sticky vs. non-sticky parts on the worksheet. We later checked if coating the probing tool with different kinds of fluids affected the stickiness.
Nature Inspires Science
The above activities helped us understand the following concepts:
Hypothesis is our clever guess about what might happen in an experiment. We test our guess to find out whether we were right or discover something surprising!
Silk used in web construction can be of different types.
Nature's glue droplets are found on the sticky threads.
Ready to become a Little Scientist? Grab our worksheet and discover how to probe and note down the observations.
Mathematics
Who knew a spider's web could be a mathematics playground? We looked closely at an orb web, traced the lines, angles, shapes and observed repeating patterns everywhere! With Ms. Spidey as our math teacher, we explored geometry, counting and relative measurements. We read an interesting fact that some spiders could weave a web measuring 20 times as wide as its body. Ms. Spidey taught us what it meant by 20 times wider and how to practically measure it? Mathematics is even more fun when taken outdoors. The Spider Web Challenge invited her to go on a spider web hunt, measuring their widths using a tool of her choice and that way, she helped Ms. Spidey find the widest web in the neighbourhood.
Nature Inspires Mathematics
The above activities helped us understand the following concepts:
Patterns are shapes or arrangements that repeat.
Unit tells us what we use for measuring. The number tells us how many, and the unit tells us what is the tool used!
Multiplication is a quick way of adding the same group again and again.
Ready to become a Little Mathematician? Grab our worksheet and discover how to measure and compare.
Engineering
Now came the challenge that got us thinking like engineers.
Spiders build webs with different patterns, and their threads can be stretched to different tensions. But how do these differences affect the way a web behaves?
We designed three webs for this engineering challenge:
Web #1: A circular orb web with tight threads.
Web #2: A circular orb web with loose threads.
Web #3: A randomly woven web with tight threads.
Using a ball of yarn, simple picture frames, and by following an instructional video on building an orb web, we could build the webs and put them to the test.
What happened when we tried to catch the same object on each web? Which construction caught, bounced and dropped the object? And how did the height, from which the weight was dropped, influence the behaviour? Did the pattern make a difference? What about the tension?
By comparing Web #1 with Web #2, we investigated the influence of tension. By comparing Web #1 with Web #3, we investigated the influence of thread arrangement.
It's was an introduction to one of engineering's most important lessons: build, test, observe and improve!
And perhaps the most exciting part? We discovered the answers through the process of experimentation and analysis.
Nature Inspires Engineering
This engineering activity helped us understand the following concepts:
Structure describes how the threads are arranged to form the web.
Tension is how tightly or loosely the threads are stretched and secured to the frame.
Variables are the things we can change in our experiment. To find out what makes a difference, we change just one thing at a time and keep everything else the same!
Ready to become a Little Engineer? Grab our worksheet and discover how spider webs are constructed.
Technology
Have you ever wondered why we call it the World Wide Web?
Just as a spider connects silk threads to form a web, the World Wide Web connects billions of web pages through hyperlinks. But there's another fascinating connection: spider webs carry vibrations, just as the internet carries information!
A Spider's Communication Network
When a fly lands on a web, it creates vibrations that travel through the silk threads, alerting the spider. Some spiders even detect these signals from their hiding places through a special signal thread!
Sending Secret Spider Messages
Using the orb web from our Engineering activity, we built a simple communication system with a sender, a signal, a pathway and a receiver.
Could tapping the hub of an orb web make the bell jingle at the other end?
Inspired by Morse code, we invented our own game of sending secret messages and trying to decode them!
Nature Inspires Technology
Our spider-web adventure introduced us to some fascinating ideas behind modern communication:
Networks connect different points called nodes.
Signals carry information.
Decode means to convert an input signal into an understandable format.
Ready to become a Little Technologist? Grab our worksheet and discover how nature can help us understand the connected world!
Wrapping Up Our Web-ful Adventure
From exploring sticky threads to web constuctions, spotting patterns and sending secret signals, a simple spider web opened up a world of STEM discoveries.
We rounded off our adventure by reading spider-themed storybooks and playing in an insect-themed play area, bringing our discoveries into stories and imaginative play.
Perhaps the loveliest change was how our little explorer now sees spiders. After discovering their remarkable skills, she sees them as clever creatures sharing our world, rather than scary critters. Curiosity has made room for understanding and respect.
