Start Your ENGINEers

Racers, start your engineers! Our racing team is desperate to win the race and needs your building skills to make this happen. Use your knowledge of speed, force, and motion to design and build a vehicle that can cross the finish line. 

How to Practice

1. Pick an engineering/STEM activity for your students to work on. Links to generic examples can be found below

   1. https://aroundthekampfire.com/2021/03/9-activities-to-teach-engineering-design-process.html

   2. https://littlebinsforlittlehands.com/easy-simple-stem-activities-challenges/

   3. https://www.weareteachers.com/fifth-grade-stem-challenges/

2. Planning Phase 

   • Start with 20 minutes to plan, then work down to 10 so your students get used to planning as a team.

   • Have students practice reading instructions and requirements without you telling them what to do. This will ensure that they will know exactly what is needed on competition day.

   • Teamwork is an integral part of any building challenge and often makes or breaks a team. Work with your students on how to create and share ideas and come to a consensus about how they will decide on a design

   • Make them draw and label their initial designs. This can change during the building phase, but it is needed for the planning process.

3. Building Phase

• Give students random supplies, even supplies that may not need to be used so they are familiar with the idea of picking what they need for building, not being told what to use and how to use it.

• Have students practice building as a team. Think about different parts of the building and who can do what. How is the structure going to come together?

• Allow students to test their structure as they build it and learn how to make changes.

• Allow students to fail. Failure is one of the most important parts of learning to engineer and design.