STEAM and Engineering resources:
Team challenges:
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Children's Engineering Resource: This excellent resource has many design briefs for real world engineering challenges that teachers have developed. They also have a great conference each year.
- Another resource for design briefs and STEAM ideas.
- Yet another resource.
- And another one with additional design briefs.
STEAM challenges that we have worked on or developed so far: We do not currently have design journals, however, this is something we think would be useful in the future. We generally just use recycled paper for our planning work rather than using the fancy planning sheets, but here are two engineering plan sheets if you wish to use them.
- Deep sea diver challenge: incorporates persuasive writing. Students researched deep sea diving; spoke with a diver who further articulated challenges that divers face; then planned diving equipment improvements and built models to share. They then wrote persuasive essays to "sell" their products (the only graded part of their work).
- Catapult challenge: this is a pretty standard challenge that is often used. Students first researched catapults, then planned and built their own and tested the distance of the projectile.
- Simple machines challenge: build a machine that will move a ball in two different directions. This was done as part of the simple machines unit (sort of a mini-Rube Goldberg).
- Native peoples villages: second grade kicked off their American Indian unit with paired research and construction of 3 tribal villages.
- Other "standard" and simple challenges: paper airplanes; roller coasters; cup towers.....etc.
- Various "themed" challenges such as: building a "bone" bridge of Qtips; solving a candy cane packaging problem for the long drop.
- Teachers pay Teachers has a lot of these "themed" type of STEM challenges.
- Storybook challenges: The Gingerbread Man (boat building); T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving (turkey and hiding place challenge). These are easy to dream up!