Demco MakerHub - FREE online database to 200+ STEAM projects in an online, searchable database
K-12 Ideas & Inspiration for Makerspaces – A LOT of free resources collected from K-12 educators around the country. Many of these blog posts are design challenges that could be used.
Strawbees Challenge Cards – if you have Strawbees (or any other design & build type products), I’ve heard these cards are great “idea generators” for a design challenge and can be used with multiple products. (i.e. one group has Strawbees, one group has K’NEX, one group has MakeDo, etc.)
Example Stations from a group from Maine - 7 Stations each for about 20-25 minutes
1. Maze Coding - The students blindfold one individual and the remaining group setup an 'obstacle' course and determine where the exit is. The students then guide the blindfold student through the maze to the exit. Students rotate the blindfolded one.
2. Making a Pizza - Students must define the recipe for creating a pizza from start to finish (Similar to the PB&J programming)
3. Guess the CSS - Students went through a presentation and jeopardy-like quiz about CSS
4. Cup Stacking - Students go through basic coding commands to stack cups
5. Algorithms - We had 2 peg boards, each with pegs glued in different areas, randomly, across the board. For the Traveling Saleswoman, students used either string or a measuring tape to find the shortest path around the board, hitting every peg. The distances were recorded to generate a competition aspect. For the Minimum Spanning Tree, students used and broke pieces of pasta to make 'bridges' to connect the pegs together. The pasta pieces are then weighed and recorded. The lowest weight is the winner.
6. Minecraft - This was a corporate partner's table -- they had facilitated an award-based system on minecraft block coding for students.
7. Front-end web design - This was a corporate partner's table -- they had a web interface that had split screens for students to test what you might see in coding in dream weaver. Lots of CSS and HTML.