Team 418 has worked with Helping Hand Home, a residential home for the most severely abused and neglected children in Central Texas, for the past 3 years. We present a challenge to the children that they can work with and enjoy. It helps them with developing team work and with keeping themselves calm and focused while working with an engineering concept.
One year we made roller coasters and plinkos out of manilla folders.
Another year we presented the penny sinking boats made from tin foil. (You add pennies until the boat sinks.) Several children had difficulty allowing the boat to sink, they were worried. We would explain to them that it was the goal and they dealt with it though it was hard.
We work with these children because it is important to our team to reach out to children who are hard to reach.
I’m looking for an idea to share with the children this year. We will spend the day with 4 groups ranging in ages from 5 through 13. The ages usually have the youngest group together but it can be mixed as the children grow older, depending on how the home organizes it. We are outside and have access to electricity, water, and tables. We have always presented the same challenge to each group. It helps us with time constraints and it helps prevent unnecessary tensions. The 45 minute session includes set up and break down. We take our materials in with us, they are not provided. We have to receive permission for each challenge because of concerns for small pieces. Last year we were able to do the penny challenge only because it was so carefully organized and presented.
Anyone have any suggestions for this year’s challenge? These children love LASA Robotics and look forward to our visit each year. Their adult volunteers always look forward to seeing the new challenge as well. Most groups that visit the home offer projects for the individual - we are one of the only groups that tries to help with teamwork development.
Thanks for any suggestions. I just got permission to start on this and will have to have everything good to go in the next 2 weeks. If you would like to PM me, that is fine, or you can respond to this thread.
One of the things I did in elementary school involved making balloon blimps that could travel the farthest.
By running a piece of string between two points (one end easily disconnectable), then gluing a straw to the top of an inflated-but-not-tied balloon, then letting go of the balloon, the balloon will shoot across the string to the other side of the room.
If you get really tricky, you can get helium balloons, and add just enough weight so the helium balloon and a regular balloon underneath cancel each other out, so when you inflate the regular balloon and let it go, it shoots across at a fairly level height all on its own.
This semester I took a student-taught course called “Rube Goldberg Machines: Theory and Practice”. We made Rube Goldberg machines. For those of you who don’t know what that is, you can find some more info here. Basically, It uses very complicated machines to accomplish simple tasks. For example, in order to press a button, someone drops a marble down a ramp, which falls into a basket, pulling it down, which pulls a lever, which releases a softball down another ramp, which triggers something else, and so on for many, many steps… eventually resulting in the button getting pressed. They are pretty fun to make, and watch.
It’s pretty easy material wise, because it ususally invoves random found objects. If you design a machine in advance, and bring the supplies specific to that design, the kids can just assemble it. Though the machines can get pretty complicated, you can still get good results through something a 5 year old can put together, especially if they have a little guidance. Another method is to just bring a whole bunch of random objects, and have them design and create their own machine. That method is a little more complicated though.
What’s fun is if you have each group create a machine, and then have group 1 trigger group 2, group 2 trigger group 3, group 3 trigger group 4, and group 4 accomplish some task. You could also just have the machines separate and have the winner be the machine that accoplishes the task the slowest.
We’ve done Saturday paper airplane contests with Elementary through Middle school aged children at local school districts. We have them work through and try different designs and settle on ones that work for them. Different designs work better for different aspects of the contest - fly farthest, stay aloft the longest, best landing accuracy, etc.
Even balled up paper qualifies.
Actually I don’t know what they are really called. How many pennies can you get on a 3x5 index card bridge before it collapses. I’ve been doing it for the yearly 3rd grade Math & Science Night at my kids’ elementary school. (This year was the first year I missed it:( – it was the same night as I had to be in Atlanta for some little robotic competition…) Very popular; some kids we have to toss out at the end of the night. Even the parents get into it. Some kids got upwards of 200 pennies!
After the first year or two I made some U-shaped supports out of 2x4s nailed together to keep a consistant distance, otherwise the supports tend to get closer together. I also bought a cheap scale to measure how many pennies, otherwise you get little kids counting every – single – penny.
The secret, actually two secrets, is how you fold the card, and to stack the pennies very carefully.
Since you have only four groups of many kids (vs my lots of 1-2 kids plus parent groups), maybe you can enlarge the size of the bridge to a manilla folder size (cut into letter size?). Of course, that means more pennies…
To clarify:
We have 4 sessions (4 groups)
Each session can be 12 to 14 children.
From there we usually break them into smaller groups of 3 or 4 children with a mentor. That is where the teamwork comes in, the 3 or 4 children work together to achieve a goal. It is very very hard for them to work together - to trust.
I will try to post a photo from last year’s penny boats so you can see. Because of the circumstances, we can not photograph their faces which is a shame - they are so engaged in the activity and concentrate so hard on the challenge. I’ll see if I can find one I can post.
I have done the paper airplanes and then had a contest on who’s went the farthest and who’s stayed in the air the longest. You can get software programs that show the kids how to make different types of airplanes. If I remimber the software was cheap.
Spaghetti bridges are also fun for kids. Give them some spaghetti, paper, glue and tape and let them build a bridge and test it at the end.
I also saw a thing this year where the kids had to build a little car out of different types of materials that had to respond to a regular house fan that was sitting in the hallway. I was shoocked at how far some went. They loved it.
I had our kids for an ice breaker one time make turtles out of bubble gum. They had to chew enough bubble gum and spit it out and use it to make a turtle. We had the engineers guess award the winner at the end.
Going along with the car, and fan idea, you can make “land boats”, have the kids make a car, or use a dollar store car and they can make and design sails for them. to add a little fun have the boats drive up an incline rather then a straight lane.
Also one of my favorite things I remember doing was a parashoot drop. have the teams make a design for parashoots that hold something, action figure, egg or what ever and see who can make the one that drops the slowest, safest, most complex design etc. all you need is a ladder , or stair tower and an adult who isn’t afraid of heights.
Egg drop. Paper, string, candy, cotton, tape, stuff like that in a bag. Each group (or individual or subgroup) gets one bag and has to keep the egg from breaking when dropped from a given height. You choose your own materials. most drops without breaking or farthest drop without breaking wins.
Rubber band airplane flight: who can send the thing the farthest. One balsa-wood rubber band-powered airplane per person/group. Wind it up, let it fly. Winner goes the farthest.
Here are 3 little activities we did in the preseason as ‘teambuilding’:
The “egg” drop…pretty self explanatory. We only set a size requirement. We went to the parking garage right next to Northeastern and started at the 1st level. About 1/2 of them survived to get to the top level…which is about 10 stories high. 2 of them made it to the point where we had to remove layers of ‘structure’ and drop them. The final one was just an egg taped to the inside of a cardboard box…the egg didn’t break.
The “paper tower”…this one is pretty simple. Who can take XXXX amt of paper and XXXX amt of tape and build the highest tower. You will see all kinds of creative designs with this one. The most effective was the one that used a “W” fold with slowly smaller W’s all the way up.
The “spaghetti bridge”…this one was mentioned already but we spanned a 10" gap with these guys and slowly added weight to a bucket that was attached to the bridge. Teams were allowed XXXX amt of hot glue sticks and XXXX amt of tape and 1 box of spaghetti.
It sure does!
Thank you everyone for your suggestions and ideas.
I’ll bounce all of these off of the team and we’ll go from there. The process involved means presenting one challenge with a back up challenge to the HHH contact for approval.
We have many constraints but don’t know what they are until we present our challenge. An example - with the manilla folder plinkos and roller coasters there was a lot of cutting with scissors involved. That was a no. So we precut everything in advance. It worked out.
If we go with paper planes that (scissors) could be a constraint that we would have to figure that out if cutting was required.
Hot glue guns, dunno.
Chewed bubble gum turtles definitely gets my vote. I’m trying to think what the proposal would look like. Maybe we could quote Scott and then the proposal committee spit out and make turtles as part of the presentation.
Dropping things seems big with you guys. We’re flat - a flat pavilion - but - there is a really cool old retired firetruck that was once part of Austin’s Zilker park playground and now resides in the HHH play yard - they might could drop stuff off different levels of the fire truck.
Whatever the team opts for and is approved, we’ll give credit to you and I will be contacting you to verify materials and directions.
Thank you,
Jane
If folks want to keep posting ideas, cool.
(wonder if Bazooka or Double Bubble is the best…)
Edit: one reason we don’t know the constraints is because we are the only science and technology/engineering type group that visits HHH so every year is like a big surprise for everyone involved as to what we can and can not do and what we have not thought of. It’s fun and part of the adventure.
I’ve done something called science in a bag. Each team got a bag with random objests like cards, pencils, clay, paper, cups, some tape, ect. Each bag contained the same stuff. One time we had to make a wind powered vehicle. There was a box fan and a lane. The distance was measured from the fan to where they went out of the lane. Another chalenge we did was who could make a tower to holdd the most weight the highest without falling over.
Miniature catapults made from wood or popsicle stick are popular with the Cub Scouts. That would involve pre-cut pieces that get assembled and some potentially troublesome small parts, such as rubber bands, bottle caps and small objects to throw (could be paper or tape rolled into a ball).
One I did in 7th grade… each group of 5-7 students got seven paper grocery bags, scisors, and a roll of tape (scisors could not be part of the structure). The goal was to create a structure that could hold at least 5 pounds of weight over 2 feet in the air, and additional points were given for more stacked weight, until someting either broke or the weights/tower toppled over.
We did a similar exercise once using standard sheets of notebook paper and office tape as the ‘kit’ materials, with quantities of each limited; e.g., three sheets of notebook paper and three inches of office tape. The weight to be supported was an algebra textbook or something similar. The winning team was the one with the maximum textbook height, maintained for at least 60 seconds per the classroom wall clock. In extreme cases the countdown was exciting.
My team has done something like this before. We’ve put on a sort of “take-apart workshop”.
Essentially, we get people to donate various small appliances that they no longer want or don’t work (Printers, Computers, blenders, toasters, vacuums, etc.). We then give the students toolboxes and have them take apart an item of their choice and try to find as many simple machines in the item as possible.
The kids have a lot of fun (they get to break things after all ) and they learn a lot too.
Some issues to keep in mind if you try something like this:
Make sure anything you give the students to take apart has any sharp objects removed if possible (blades from kitchen equipment and such)
Safety glasses are a must as things can (and do) fly off of the appliances as they are being taken apart
The kids tend to get their hands dirty doing this, some sort of clean up is helpful. We used a kind of orange soap/ hand sanitizer with silica sand and gave them paper towels to wipe their hands off afterwards.
Make sure you have a LOT of trash bags. They tend to make a mess.
We got a lot of good feedback from the schools we visited when we put this on. There were quite a few “this was my favorite station” comments from the students as well.
perhaps borrow some ideas from Odyssey of the Mind spontaneous problems for quick “warm ups” to break the ice, etc. They have “hands-on” and “verbal” problems with a range of requirements. Examples: name things that are red (or read) name things that change, name uses for _____, build a tower out of provided materials that holds pennies, build a transport device, etc. http://www.geocities.com/nepaootmspon/
For anyone who has been to fps state there is a challenge called circus maximums “beside the point.” Its where there are about 5 challenges that you have to complete. One was who could make the tallest tower out of news paper and only that. Another was making the tallest tower out of index cards. Last there was the longest cantilever made from toothpicks and clay. “That was all with an engineering concept.
If any questions about anything described feel free to pm me.
) and they learn a lot too.