Snow Way

​Challenge
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?
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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

• index cards
• cotton balls
• tape
• rulers
• paper
• scissors

Hints and Tips for Success

1. Allow students planning and discussion time by having them experiment with the index cards to see how flexible and durable they are.
2. After experimenting, allow student groups to plan their design by drawing it out and doing a little testing with a few cards. Include as many ways to improve their forts as needed.
3. For differentiation, adjust the amount of materials available and allowed to use, add any additional materials, take away certain materials, include different amounts of snowballs launched, change the dimensions of the fort, etc. Adjustments could be made to make it more challenging or simpler.
4. Make sure to standardize the launching of the snowballs so all forts experience similar attacks. Also, standardize the snowballs if using paper to make sure they are about the same size.
5. Connect to math by discussing dimensions and what that means, measurement, shapes, symmetry, angles, etc.
6. Connect to social studies by researching the different kinds of forts, how they were used, the different materials used to build them, where there still are forts, etc.