Pumpkin Lab lesson plans
Each one is a class period with everything to run it: a teacher plan, a student worksheet, an exit ticket with answers, and the standards it meets. Students need no account, and a free class saves their work.
Pumpkin Lab: Light Through a Pumpkin
A jack-o'-lantern is a light experiment everyone has seen. In this lesson students open a 3D pumpkin whose face is carved three different ways: the left eye and the nose are cut all the way through, the right eye is only shaved (the skin peeled off, the flesh left), and the grin is only painted on. Before turning the lights off, they predict what each mark will do in the dark. Then they press Night and find out: the holes blaze and throw their shape onto the far wall, the shaved eye glows through the thin flesh but throws no shape, and the painted grin stays dark. They change a mark from one kind to another and test again, then grow an eye and watch its shape on the wall grow with it. By the end, students can describe light that is transmitted, partly transmitted and absorbed, and explain with straight-line rays why the face on the wall is bigger than the hole.
On Teachers Pay TeachersPumpkin Lab: A Stencil That Holds Together
The library is holding a family carving night and needs one stencil that every family can tape to a pumpkin and cut. The brief has three requirements: nothing falls out of the pumpkin except the cuts themselves, the eyes and nose are symmetric, and the stencil prints at its real size on a single sheet of Letter paper. The starter design, a face with BOO across the bottom, fails all three. The O's lose their middles, the eyes do not match, and the word is so wide the stencil takes four pages. Students test the design with the lab's own checks, then fix it through Carve by code, where every cut is a line like cut circle at -25 degrees, 64 percent up, 56 mm. They replace the second eye with the single word mirror, shave the letters so nothing falls out, and work out how small the word must be to fit the page. By the end, students can find a line of symmetry, explain why a closed shape falls out of a stencil, and explain why a real-size print takes more pages rather than a smaller picture.