Design Challenges in Physical Science

Teaching Physical Science in a classroom setting was new for me this year. (And the reason for so few blog posts this year.) Since I was building this course from scratch, I decided to try to design it according to the NGSS. New York put out a draft of their modified NGSS that guided me through class planning. Science and Engineering Practices is one of the key components of the NGSS and by the second half of the year, I finally started using some labs that were open-ended design challenges.

I don't teach this class at the same school I teach AP Biology. This class is at a non-traditional Consortium, where I only see my students once a week for 90 minutes (and then they do the rest of the learning at home) and there is an age range of students from 6th-8th grade. This is the first year that I've taught a class with 6th graders. The two years before, I taught Advanced Life Science at this Consortium for 7th-9th graders. I figured that 6th-8th wouldn't be much different, but it was a completely different dynamic! This class did not work as independently as I was used to classes doing. But, when I gave them design challenges, they took them on with enthusiasm and hardly needed redirection. They did four challenges in the second semester. For most, they had a full 80 minutes to work on the design.

When we neared the end of our unit on forces and interactions, student groups completed the egg drop challenge, that I blogged about here. They each received a bag of the same items and had to choose a design for their egg holder. They were allowed to trade with other groups if both groups agreed to it and they had a scoring scale to also help them as they decided what and how much of it to use. They wanted the lowest score possible which was determined by mass of apparatus, number of seconds it took to load the apparatus, the number of items in the apparatus. In the end, three out of seven of the groups dropped their eggs without breaking them.

When we started the unit on energy, students built a Rube Goldberg machine to complete a chosen task, utilizing the maximum number of simple machines. In this challenge students tried to maximize their points.  I brought in a collection of dominoes (including a standard set and two wooden sets of large dominoes), two sets of Legos from the Crazy Action Contraptions book plus several more pieces from my kids' Legos, yarn, marbles, cardboard boxes, toilet paper and paper towel tubes, and a roll of masking tape.

The next week, we moved onto building marble roller coasters (that I blogged about here) with lengths of pipe insulation cut in half. They had some parameters to follow--number of loops, turns, and hills. We also used their finished roller coasters to practice finding the average speed of the marble in the coaster.

We finished off the unit with a heat challenge. Students were given their choice of several items and tasked with designing an insulating box for a paper cup that would hold the heat of water as well as or better than a Styrofoam cup. I originally saw this idea in the Carolina Biological catalog. In fact they have several kits to use as design challenges in physical science--they're a great resource. I did some googling and used several sources to put together this challenge. (I would have been tempted to just buy the Carolina kit, but it was for a much larger class than I had.)

I'll include links to each of the challenge directions that I gave each group, the lab sheets that I gave them to complete an glue into their notebooks, and the scoring sheets I gave out for the ones that they were competing for the highest or lowest score to win some sort of prize.

Forces and Motion Unit:

Egg Drop Challenge Group Directions

Egg Drop Challenge Lab Sheet

Egg Drop Challenge Score Sheets

Energy Unit:

Rube Goldberg Machine Group Directions

Rube Goldberg Machine Lab Sheet

Rube Goldberg Machine Score Sheets


Marble Roller Coaster Group Directions

Marble Roller Coaster Lab Sheet


Keep The Heat Group Directions

Keep The Heat Lab Sheet

Keep The Heat Score Sheets

Egg Drop Challenge

As we were wrapping up our unit on forces and interactions in Physical Science, I wanted the kids to have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and also have some practice with the engineering process. For our last class before the unit test, we had an egg drop challenge.

I did some research on line, but many of the challenges out there are for students to build an apparatus at home and bring it in for the competition. Since I only see my students for one 90 minute session a week, they are busy during the week with reading the chapter and doing other assignments. I wanted students to have the opportunity to test designs and make improvements as well as practice working as a team.  So, I pilfered ideas mainly from this document and put together what would be my student's in class building challenge.

Students had about 70 minutes to design and build their egg holder. Some were a little slow to start, but by the end they were all fully engaged. If I were to do this again, I'd try to figure out some way to limit the amount of glue from the glue gun used per team. I had about 7 sticks (for a full sized glue gun) and it was all used before some teams had a chance to use it even once. It was primarily one team that went hog wild with it.

In the end, of the seven teams, three of them successfully dropped their egg and had no damage to the egg. The other four were valiant attempts, all of which were exciting to watch.

Here are the directions that I gave students.  It also includes the list of materials that I provided each team. All of it fit in a gallon ziplock bag. Three of the teams asked if they could use the gallon bag, and I did allow them too--even though it wasn't on their list. For students' notebooks, I gave them this reflection sheet. I also made these score sheets. These scores did not effect their lab grade, but was used to decide some fun prizes. In the end, we did not measure the distance from the target since we had to drop them on the stairs and the egg holders were flying everywhere off the steps.