Activity 2.3: Deciding What to Sell at Your Carnival Stand

Introduction

Students will explore how the Engineering Design Process is used to help create solutions. Groups will use information from the "Who are You?" survey to help determine which item they plan to sell at their concession stand.

Preparation Needed for Activity:

• • Engineering Design Process (EDP) poster

  • The Questions to Consider slide or poster from Activity 2.1

Part 1 - Working as Engineers: 30 min

As engineers design and develop concepts, they use the Engineering Design Process. Guide the students through the parts of the Engineering Design Process, using the EDP Poster. Emphasize that the process is not necessarily linear--that engineers might go through many rounds of ideating, evaluating, prototyping and testing before they decide on the best solution.

• Identify the Problem

  • • Identify and explain the problem you are trying to solve. This step should not include any information about a solution for the problem.

• Understand

  • • In the Understand section, you should identify each requirement that the solution must meet. Requirements can be features that the solution must have, such as wheels, a handle, or an amount of profit, but also can be factors that restrict the solution as well, such as weight, price or who the user will be. These are also called Constraints.

• Ideate

  • • The Ideate section is where you come up with possible ideas for solutions to the problem. This section should include a good description of your ideas, and possibly sketches of them.

• Evaluate

  • • When you Evaluate, you compare each solution idea against your list of requirements to help you judge which ideas best meet the solution requirements. This will help you decide which ideas you should prototype and test.

• Prototype and Test

  • • During this stage, you build a model, or prototype, of your solution so you can test it. You need to determine how you will test each of the requirements. The tests should have defined procedures so that every test that you perform will be consistent and will yield accurate results.

• Communicate Your Solution

  • • During this stage you communicate to your audience the results of your tests and your decision about which idea was best.

Part 2 - Brainstorming what you will sell: 30 min

In their groups, students will brainstorm and make their final decision regarding their concession stand products. They will also decide what problem they are solving, come up with a list of requirements for the concession stand. The requirements for the concession stands should include market research, so students know there are people who want to buy the food, and a list of all the things needed for the concession stand (cups, grills, etc.) Students also need to understand that the stand should make a profit, so they will need to determine the prices for all necessary items. Guide the students towards understanding how to use the data that the class collected as market research to help them decide what they will sell at their food stand. In particular, the class' answers to Questions 2,6,7,8,9 from the "Who are You?" survey should help them make a decision.

The following is an example that you can use with the class to illustrate how to take the data from the survey and use it to help make a decision about their concession stand.

All carnivals need drink stands because people get thirsty, and knowing what to offer is critical to making money. Question 8 on the survey asked about favorite drinks and offered the categories of water, soda, and juice. Which of these was most preferred by the class? How many drink options do you think a concession stand should offer? Which ones? What other requirements are there if you have a concession stand that sell drinks? Do you need cups? Ice? Cans? Bottles? A fountain system?

With the remaining time the groups should get together and make a final decision about what problem they are solving, and what products they want to sell at their concession stand. They will also need to decide what other things they will need to be able to sell their product.

***The Google files below are copy only files. When you click the link you will see a page asking you to click a "Make a copy" button, click the button and it will create a copy of the file in your personal/school Google drive. Once in your drive, you will be able to edit and send the file to your students and view responses once collected.