Engineering Design Challenges

I love creating fun, engaging, hands-on design challenges for students. Sometimes, the best design challenges are ones that can fit on a sticky note.

For example, "Create a Lego Balloon Car that can Travel the Furthest" or "Build a device that can communicate a message using light"

Here's one I did recently with Grade 3 students as part of their Forces and Motion unit. We used lego technic kits for this challenge and spent the morning doing this:

We used our ISB Design Challenge to guide students through the engineering design challenge.

Students worked in partnerships, planned their ideas with labels and then built their prototype. We recorded data on how far it travelled and then they immediately used that feedback to go back and iterate their designs.

The great thing about this challenge as students got a chance to iterate their designs many times as they could test it as often as they liked!