6th Grade

August/September

Students worked in teams to strengthen their communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity skills. We applied the engineering design process as we investigated, planned, created, tested, and evaluated landing pad designs.

🚀 Engineering Landing Pads

In this unit, students considered the problem of packaging waste generated by conventional shipping practices. Preparing for a future of drone deliveries, students learn that a cushioned landing pad can potentially address this problem. Our challenge was to design and test a landing pad that could protect a deliverable item when dropped from a given height.

• We learned how energy transfers when something hits the ground and how different materials can absorb kinetic energy.

• We conducted investigations to identify landing pad materials that reduce the amount of kinetic energy transferred to an object during a collision.

• We tested how high objects bounce, how materials change shape (deform), and which materials and designs work best.
  
  

• We had balance criteria and constraints to meet the designated criteria for success and client preferences while staying within the specified constraints. 

• We made tradeoffs among parameters such as cost, performance, materials, time, ethics, and sustainability as we planned for, built, and tested our designs.
  
  

By the end of the unit (late October), we will have discovered how teamwork, problem-solving, and creativity can help us design systems—just like scientists and engineers do in the real world. 🌍✨

Team Building Challenge- Design a cell phone holder to prevent "text neck". 

Collecting bounce height data to determine which material best absorbs kinetic engery.