Highway Design for the Future

It's time to slow your roll! Can your class create a track that allows a marble to roll as slowly as possible? Teams of science scholars collaborate to design, build, and test their tubes while learning about gravity and friction.

What kind of design challenges are there in building structures to support rocket engines? The unit takes design teams through the process of building the lightest possible thrust support structure that can withstand the necessary forces...

During the Winter Olympics, this would be an engaging task to include in your STEM lesson plan. Design teams plan, construct, and test a miniature ski lift that can carry a pingpong ball up and down a rope line without falling out. With...

Can you build it? Yes you can! This interactive game includes four design challenges presented on separate cards. The cards outline the challenges with limited restrictions but with an end goal in mind. The competitions include building...

Help your class get out of a sticky situation! Future engineers explore existing tape dispensers and then design a new system for dispensing tape. To put these systems to the test, they build and evaluate prototypes of their designs.

After reading about the history and science of personal floatation devices, patents, and intellectual property, engineering teams design a life vest for a can of soup. To evaluate which groups considered the need for waterproofing, hold...

Providing clean water to a town is quite a feat... is your class up for the challenge? After a short reading about water towers, groups work together to design a working water delivery system. The water flow must be adjustable (able to...

Everyone knows that cars have safety features, but wouldn't it be fun to design your own? Learners with visual impairments build a ramp and then attempt to use the material provided to design a safety system to protect a raw egg from a...

Groups design the ultimate roller coaster by considering potential and kinetic energy. They test their designs using marbles and then go on to rate each group's design based on aesthetics, loop diameter, and cost.

How efficient is a motor in a LEGO set? Future engineers conduct an activity where a LEGO motor-generator system raises an object to a specified height. They then show what they learned and use their measurements to calculate the energy...