My first words of advice is never assume that your students are doing these types of activities in their classrooms.  Never assume that this is something “old” or that any activity is too easy. We talk a lot about STEM now and STEM challenges and design challenges in our profession, but that does not necessarily mean that students are accessing this information outside of your classroom. 

It’s definitely a struggle to keep the momentum going as we wind down the school year, so I decided to fill the last two weeks with STEM Challenges.  Because I started mid-year, we have not had much time for STEM activities.  I was hoping that this would be a great way to keep students engaged, discuss the design process, and work together to solve problems.  However, planning STEM challenges for a school of 500+ students isn’t the easiest thing to be doing when you want to start cleaning everything up for the Summer. So I had to make it a priority to plan for it and was able to get everything prepped and ready to go.  To make it easier, I decided to use one challenge for grades K-2 and one challenge for grades 3-5.  In planning, it was also important to me that we were using more reusable materials then consumable materials as there is no budget and a lot of students! 

Both of the following ideas and design process model came from this great post!

K-2 STEM CHALLENGE

The BEST part about this is that there are so few materials, and the students were completely engaged.  I brought in play-doh from home and gave each pair of students about half of the tub to work with.  Before getting started, we discussed the design process, and then I had students work to plan their design.  We have dry erase tables, so I gave them each a marker and they were able to draw their design on the tables.  But paper and pencil will work just as well!  Here is the design process model I used.

**Side-Note: One of the days we were working on this, we were not able to work in the media center, so I had all grades do the play-doh challenge.  The older students loved it just as much as the younger ones and their designs were AMAZING.

Make sure that you leave the last 10 minutes of class to measure the students’ structures, discuss the process that they went through during the building process, and to clean up of course!

Here are some questions that I ask at the end of the lesson to get the students thinking:

What was really frustrating about the building process?
To those students who were able to create structures that were solid and not falling over, what did you do to get your structure to stand by itself?
Did you enjoy working with a partner on this or did you find it to be challenging?
If your structure fell over while you were building, what did you do differently when rebuilding it?

3-5 STEM CHALLENGE

These students also had to take the time to think and plan with their students.  On their tables, I had them write the materials that they would be using so it wasn’t a mad dash for the maker space area and to make sure they were not just grabbing everything and bringing it back to their tables.

What worked for us was to allow 15 full minutes at the end of the class to have each group come up and test their balls.  We did not use a stop watch to measure time, but that would be a great way to get a clear “winner.”  For my students, I don’t focus too much on the competition part of this because it always leads them astray.  However, after all the balls have been raced, we do choose the 3 slowest and race them to see whose is the ultimate slowest in the class.

To be honest, I was nervous to do all of this in the last few weeks of school because I knew it would be messy and loud, but I am so happy that I did it.  The student excitement and engagement were amazing and has helped to make the end of the year fly by!

I know some of you are already out of school, but we will be here until June 26th!! If you’re still in it, like I am, comment below about how you are finishing up your last week or two!