Fun Engineering Games

[Molten]

I'm sure many of you have been through little mini-engineering competitions before. The sort where you have to build a bridge with pasta or a tower of paper. I've done several myself, but am tasked with choosing one to host for a call-out meeting. Anyone have some games that they found particularly fun? Specifications would be easy to clean up and a task that can be completed in less then an hour. The one that was used in the past was being given 1(or 2) sheets of printer paper, scissors, and 12 inches of tape. From there, they had to build as tall of a tower as possible. I'm hoping to come up with something of similar difficulty but still be different. Any good stories to share?

Jason

[JamesCH95]

Gumdrops + toothpicks = bridge

Paper airplane designed to (1) go the furthest or (2) stay aloft the longest

Egg-drop contest with limited supplies

[GCentola]

The following is inexpensive, does not require multitudes of differetn supplies, and can be done in under an hour. The video is great and explains why the challenge works, and some of the lessons it teaches. It is something I am considering running on my own team.

http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html

[IKE]

In addition to those fun ideas.

We have done Clay boats where each team gets a stick of modeling clay to make a boat that floats in a tub of water. Winner is the team that carries heaviest payload before sinking. Payload can be marbles, BBs...

I always wanted to do "ice-cream" towers where ther would be some common tools, and each team would start with a frozen box of ice-cream. 2 winners by tallest measured, and tallest after X minutes (30 minute timeframe on a moderately warm day would provide an interesting twist).

A neat one to teach about "testing" would be to give teams identical 3 man surgical tubing slingshots. On a football field and tell them they have 30 minutes to practice with the slingshot. After 30 minutes bring out 3 different projectiles and see who is able to be the most accurrate. To add in more science, allow them pencil paper, a protractor, a level, a scale, and a tape measure. Small water balloons work really well for this, and launchers are about $15 and make excellent T-Shirt launchers.

[Michael Hill]

In my high school Physics class, we got into teams had a popsicle stick building competition. We were given (some number) of popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. The team that could support the most weight won. I happened to team up with some other people that were on the robotics team, and yes...we won hands down . In fact, we ran out of weights that the teacher had. One of the team members had to go to a tractor supply store to get a bucket and some high-tensile strength cable so we could put more weights in. The bridge still never broke (until some jealous person ended up breaking it later that year).

[Molten]

Originally Posted by GCentola

The following is inexpensive, does not require multitudes of differetn supplies, and can be done in under an hour. The video is great and explains why the challenge works, and some of the lessons it teaches. It is something I am considering running on my own team.

http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html

I love this idea, but I need to add a specification. There will be somewhere around 10 people competing(always hoping for more though). Though teams would be lots of fun, we won't have enough people to really do this well.

Thanks for the ideas so far,
Jason

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Just last week we gave a magazine, three feet of tape, and a 2 foot long 1/8 x1/8" piece of balsa with the goal of holding an FTC scoring device 2 feet above a surface for 15 seconds.