Engineering Challenges

Part of my plan to get my students prepared for a creative and unusual year was to include engineering challenges.  These ended up working out well as periodic incentives to get students to make progress on their assignments during lulls in the year.  I also wanted an activity that would really separate building days from the other days in class of staring at their computer and working.  The idea of having these challenges was to introduce students to the engineering design process and standards, while also getting them in the right mindset to approach the larger engineering assignments.

For my first Engineering Challenge day of the year, I chose 3 short challenges for the students to work on.  These were quick activities that didn’t require too many supplies and were easy to clean up.  Students could not move on to the 2nd or the 3rd until they had finished the previous challenges.  I had the students record their thoughts in a survey along the way but ended up having to split the survey into 3 separate ones because not everyone was able to complete these on the same day.  From this I did indeed learn that I have have to distinguish whether an activity is one day, all or nothing, or if it could be dragged out for multiple days.

The first challenge was to build the tallest tower possible from 6 sheets of newspaper using only 1 yard of tape.  Challenge 1 survey link:  goo.gl/UvjQeW.  This was a good challenging but possible activity that led to quite a variety of designs and techniques.  One thing I didn’t like though was the competition aspect ended up discouraging some students from trying.  Once they’d seen one group build something very tall then they knew they couldn’t compete so they didn’t bother putting in as much effort.  The competition might work only if everyone was racing under a fixed amount of time rather than working on this at their own pace.

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The second challenge was to suspend a dictionary above the table.  Challenge 2 survey link: goo.gl/pCFo5t .  This is an activity that can be solved rather quickly with a cylinder or that can be made incredibly complicated.  By this point I had underestimated the amount of newspaper I’d need so I don’t think I’d do two activities with the same supplies in one session.  Somehow this project became a challenge to suspend books on newspaper between two chairs.  One of my classes got out of control with adding more and more books to their stack and truly testing the breaking point of the paper.  The other class went in a different direction and reasoned that they could balance the book on their bodies over the table and got around the instructions that way.  It was very interesting to witness the unique and creative ways that both classes now started to find loopholes in the instructions and created their own engineering challenges.

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The final challenge was to stand inside a piece of paper.  Challenge 3 survey link:  goo.gl/gCSTLQ  I’ve been a participant in this one before so I know that once you’ve seen the answer then it’s no longer a thought puzzle but rather becomes a logistical puzzle.  The students struggled with this for a bit though and I was surprised at how long it took before someone decided to Google the solution.  The groups that hadn’t looked it up tried all sorts of ripping and attaching it to things before figuring out how to make a huge loop.  By this time, the students had also gotten a bit fatigued from solving these so in the future this one would be a good stand-alone activity versus part of a series.  One thing I don’t like about this one is that there is really only one solution as opposed to the others which have many possibilities.  I do prefer the open-ended challenges over the single answer ones.

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