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Challenge
Are you ready for some football? For most Americans, football is the epitome of fall. It is in full swing now and gives us great reasons to eat yummy snacks. Americans actually have a day set aside to celebrate football. November 5 is American Football Day, and it reminds us about the great sport and that the season is halfway over. So, how can football be translated into a STEM Challenge? There are actually many different possibilities for challenges that could connect to the real world that engineers work on. Creating helmets to prevent injuries, making gloves that provide the best grip, designing shoes that get the best traction on fields, and testing materials that make the ball aerodynamic to name a few. What others can you think of? For this STEM Challenge, you will be tasked with designing the goalposts and a “kicker”. The object of the challenge is to design a little catapult-esque contraption that flings the “football” through the goalposts. What materials would work best for this and for accuracy? What shape, size, and design should the “kicker” be to be most effective? Can you replicate something out there already designed? Your “kicker” creation does have some criteria and constraints. Determine specific dimensions for your goalposts so all groups experience fairness with their accuracy. The “kicker” should be self-sufficient in the manner that the “football” is flung by the “kicker” with limited help from the designer. Standardize the distance the “kicker” must be from the goalposts and then see if the design will work from further out. Track the accuracy of the “kicker”: out of 10 attempts, what is the accuracy percentage? Standardize the “football” for all groups (a crumbled piece of paper, small ball, eraser, pom poms, etc) Materials
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Challenge
Halloween is a hot topic floating around the communities. Families are debating whether to go door-to-door to interact with different households to experience Halloween. What might this look like with social distancing guidelines in place? How can we safely administer candy to children without potentially spreading germs? Should Halloween be cancelled or is there an alternative that can be designed to continue the tradition? If you haven’t guessed it by now, this month’s challenge has to deal with distributing candy to trick-or-treaters in a sanitary manner. Your challenge is to create a contraption that will deliver candy from one area into a trick-or-treat bag at least 6 feet away. What possibilities can you think of to deliver the candy? Will your design be tough enough to deliver all shapes and sizes of candy? Can you replicate anything that already exists to help you out? Your candy deliverer does have some criteria and constraints. As stated before, it must span a distance of 6 feet to maintain social distancing guidelines. The candy must also be easily obtainable by the trick-or-treater to put in their candy bag. Upon delivery, the candy shouldn’t be damaged for the trick-or-treater. Finally, the candy deliverer should be suitable for all types of different candy, not just the test candy. Materials
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Time: to measure or record the speed, duration, or rate of something. That is just one definition of the word, and there are many others. But this is the most accurate definition that will be needed for this month’s STEM challenge. There are many ways to measure time and the challenge will test different ways to measure time in seconds. What are the different ways to measure time? How many measurements can you think of that involve some kind of time? How much time does it take to do different tasks? Answering these questions could help you design a timer, which is the STEM Challenge. Your timer though is going to be manual and not electronic! What items can you use to build a timer? How will you test it to know it measures the time you want it to? Do you need a timer to measure your timer? Your goal is to build a timer using some kind of block or item that can be knocked over like dominoes. The timer must go for almost exactly 5 or 10 seconds. Your timer does have some criteria and constraints. The timer starts from when the first item gets pushed over to when the last item falls. Only items being knocked over can be used in the creation. You can mix and match different items to create the domino effect. Materials
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Did you know in August there are two separate special days dedicated to marshmallows? One day is August 10, which is National S’mores Day, and you can’t have a s’more without a marshmallow! The other day is August 30, which is Toasted Marshmallow Day! So of course, this month’s challenge has to do with marshmallows, especially toasting them AND making s’mores! Your challenge is to create a contraption that will make a marshmallow warm and soft along with chocolate to make a s’mores. You probably will not be able to really toast it since fire will not be used. You’ll be using the sun’s heat energy to help you accomplish the task. What materials will work best to capture the heat? How large should the contraption be? What shape, size, and design should it be to be most effective? How can you measure the effectiveness of the contraption? Your contraption and creation do have some criteria and constraints. Each contraption or solar oven should test one marshmallow or piece of chocolate at a time. All the marshmallows and chocolate should be about the same size and type. While testing, the solar ovens should be placed in the same sunny area. Use the same thermometer for taking the temperature inside the box. Materials
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With recent launches of rockets and a few more happening in July, it's time to blastoff this month with the STEM Challenge! Check out the Events Calendar at Kennedy Space Center for upcoming launches to watch them live or previous launches to prepare for builidng your own rocket to launch. Your challenge is to create and design a rocket and launch pad for blastoff. Adjust the rocket fuel and rocket design to see which provides the best blastoff. What size rocket will work best? What if the rocket had fins or other designs? Does the ratio of fuel ingredients matter? What about the ratio of fuel to the rocket size? What should the rocket launch pad be? The goal is create the best rocket you can and to experiment with all those questions! Design some sort of launch pad first. The goal of the launch pad is to hold the bottle upside down in an upright position. Next, decide on a plastic bottle to use as your rocket and design your rocket. Finally, experiment with the ratio of your rocket fuel or baking soda and vinegar. Your creation does have some criteria and constraints. Make sure safety is noted at all times. After the rocket is fueled, place it in the launch pad, and back away. Only launch rockets in a wide open spaces and from the designed launch pad. For launching, fill the bottle with the chosen vinegar ratio, pour the baking soda on a 4"x4" piece of paper towel, wrap up the baking soda with the paper towel, stuff it carefully into the spout of the bottle, cork the bottle, and turn it upside down into the launcher and move quickly out of the way. Prepare for blastoff! Materials
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June 14 is the holiday known as Flag Day. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress took a break from writing the Articles of Confederation and passed a resolution stating that “the flag of the United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white,” and that “the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson marked the anniversary of that decree by officially establishing June 14 as Flag Day. Being Flag Day is this month, your challenge revolves around it. Countries use flags to portray themselves to the rest of the world and can be portraits of the past. Your challenge is to keep this ideal in mind and design a flag that represents you. What shape will your flag be? What colors will it be? What symbols will be included? How does all of that information represent you? There are no criteria or constraints for this challenge. Use your creativity and showcase yourself! Materials
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Looking for something to do inside or outside? Why not start a garden? You could choose to plant flowers, vegetables, or different kinds of plants. You can find vegetable seeds almost in any vegetable in your house. The beginning of May is the perfect time to start planting! Find those seeds and plant them in a pot with some soil. Your challenge this week has to deal with planting. How will they grow best? What do they need? How much of that do they need? Can you create some kind of experiment, tracking the data, to find out? Try it with multiple seeds, different kinds of plants, different amounts or kinds of soil, different places outside or inside (shady or sunny), different amounts of water, or anything else you can think of to experiment. Your experiment does have some criteria and constraints. Make sure to collect data on your plants. Before beginning make a hypothesis about which will grow the best and why. After completing the experiment, make a claim about how to grow the plant best by using evidence and reasoning. Materials
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Are you stuck at home and looking for something fun, easy, and science to do? I’m a big fan of Rube Goldberg machines and think this might be something to tie fun, easy, and science all together! What is a Rube Goldberg machine though? Let’s start with Rube Goldberg, himself. He was an American Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor, and his work is a classic example of the melding of art and science. Goldberg began his career as an engineer, and later became a cartoonist who drew elaborate illustrations of contraptions made up of pulleys, cups, birds, balloons, and watering cans that were designed to solve a simple task such as opening a window or setting an alarm clock. Interestingly, Goldberg only drew the pictures, and never built any of his inventions. However, these pictures have since served as inspiration for makers and builders who want the challenge of making wild inventions to solve everyday problems. So, that is your challenge for today. Can you build a Rube Goldberg machine to solve a simple problem? Maybe you want to turn on a fan, pour a glass of water, knock over an item, catch something, turn on a light, pop a balloon, ring a bell etc.! The possibilities are endless. For this challenge, there is no criteria or constraints. Use your creativity, ideas, thinking, and materials to create your own contraption! Materials
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NCAA March Madness is a single-elimination basketball tournament played each spring. 68 Division I college basketball teams battle for the national championship. It’s “Madness” because it captures the excitement around sports with the tournament, the upsets that happen between teams, the filling out of brackets, and the teams vying for the top spot! Since the tournament happens mostly in March, it is going to be the theme for this month’s STEM Challenge. Your challenge is to create a “trophy” for the champions of the basketball tournament. Your trophy must hold an actual basketball at the top of the trophy. What shape, size, and design should the trophy be to hold the basketball? How tall should the trophy be? What materials can you use? Your creation does have some criteria and constraints. As mentioned, the basketball has to sit at the top of the trophy. It should support the basketball for 20 seconds without crumpling. The basketball cannot be taped to the supports. The supports cannot be taped to the building surface. It must be at least 12 inches high. You can only use the materials given. Materials
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February is Cupid’s month and who is Cupid without his bow and arrow he uses to help people fall in love? But Cupid is experiencing some trouble with his arrows. They seem to be going too slow to reach his designated targets. He needs your help to make Valentine’s Day a success. This is your challenge to design an arrow protocol that is speedier than Cupid’s current arrows. Since you will be making a protocol arrow by representing an object, think about the materials being used. What types of balloons will make the best arrow? Are different shapes better than others? How can the materials be manipulated for best use? How can you make the arrow look like an arrow and be aerodynamic? Your arrow creation does have some criteria and constraints. You can only use one balloon in your design. The finished product has to resemble an arrow Cupid would use by using the construction paper as design aspects. It has to be placed on the straw line system to be tested. It has to travel about 10' and hit the target to stop the time trial. Finally, the speedier, the better. Materials
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January is a great time to have a snowball fight. Every good snowball fight needs some kind of fort for protection and to build more snowballs under cover. Snowball fights are best suited for outdoors, but what about modeling one inside? This will be part of your challenge, building a fort to withstand attacks from snowballs. Since you will be modeling the activity, representing an idea, object, a system or process, think of the materials being used. What kind of structure makes the best fort? Are different shapes better than others? How can the materials be manipulated for best use? Your snowball fort creation does have some criteria and constraints. The fort is being constructed out of 100 index cards and only 12 inches of tape. The fort has to be at least 9 inches tall and 10 inches long. To test the fort, determine how 3 snowballs (cotton balls or wadded up pieces of paper) can be fairly launched at the fort to test its durability. Materials
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This month's challenge is a little different than previous months'. It is based on the Hour of Code! The challenge is to have every student in your classroom complete at least an Hour of Code in the month of December. The Hour of Code initiative takes place each year during Computer Science Education Week, which is December 9-15. You can experience this at any time of the year, though! It is held annually in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906). The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. Head here, https://hourofcode.com/us/learn, to checkout the free tutorials and experiences for all grade levels. Additional information about completing the challenge and on the initiative can be found at https://hourofcode.com/us. Happy Coding! Challenge
Did you know, STEM Day falls on November 8? There’s no way around it: children are significantly better off with strong science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics skills. That’s why STEM education programs are so important. It’s undebatable that these subjects push society forward, and these programs help to find fun and engaging ways to teach them to students, which is all worth commemorating. So, on November 8, we celebrate STEM Day! How can you celebrate? By taking part in the STEM challenge on this day or any other day this month. This month's STEM challege is a little different. The challenge is to build and make a model to brainstorm and answer, "What does STEM mean to you?" Students can build a model to represent what they think STEM means or how they see it using various materials. There are no criteria or contstaints to this challenge. It is an open-ended, metaphoric prompt to let students explore and think critically about the solution. Materials
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This is the time of year when we often start noticing more spiders and their webs. We tend to associate spiders and webs with Halloween. Why? Well, many spiders reach adulthood in the late summer and early fall. So, they become more visible to us, and there are more spiders to create even more webs. Spider silk, the strongest fiber in nature, is used to make their webs. It is stronger than steel and thinner than a strand of hair! Webs are used to help spiders catch their prey and to help alert the spider of predators. If you haven’t guessed it by now, this month’s challenge has to deal with spider webs. Your challenge is to create a spider web to capture the most items. What material would work best for capturing the items? What shape, size, and design should the web be to be most effective? Can you emulate an actual spider’s web from nature? Your spider web creation does have some criteria and constraints. Determine specific dimensions for your webs so they turn out to be generally the same size. The web must look like a spider web, meaning with strands and holes. The objects being caught in the web must be the same with identical processes of how the objects reach the webs. Materials
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Arrrrrre you aware that September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Get ye mateys aboard for this month’s challenge, which is pirate themed. Treasure maps were popular among the crew to look for their booty. They included symbols, directions, pictures, booby traps, keys, and other forms of communication to help remember where their treasure was hidden. Your challenge this month is to create a treasure map to locate a certain place or object. It focuses on the engineering practice of generating and comparing multiple possible solutions to a problem based on how well each is likely to meet the criteria of the problem. What kind of map will be best? What should be included on a map? How can the communication be clear and directions easy to follow? Your treasure map does have some criteria and constraints. Make sure all groups are creating a treasure map to the same place and starting from the same location. This way groups will be able to compare their solutions. A rubric or system of comparing should be devised to regulate map comparisons. Rubric components could include ease of reading map, ability to find the treasure according to the map, design, or type of directions. Materials
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