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COPYRIGHT 2008 International Technology Education Association
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What do you get when you mix some rubber bands, cardboard, wooden skewers, and blank CDs? Thanks to the Design Squad Educator's Guide, you get a racecar--and teachers across the country are using it to have their students engineer the zippiest racecars possible. At the Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School in Manalapan, New Jersey, Donna Falk's eighth grade science class is discovering just how fun and engaging engineering challenges can be.
Like real engineers, Ms. Falk's students work in teams, using the easy-to-follow instructions in the Design Squad Educator's Guide to assemble the parts. The cardboard forms the car body, the skewer becomes the axle, CDs are the wheels, and the rubber bands provide the power. But assembly is only the beginning of the activity. After about ten minutes of building their rubber-band cars, Carl and Maria are the first team in Ms. Falk's class ready to test their "prototype." In the testing area, they wind the axle several times (twisting the rubber band, which creates potential, or stored, energy), place their car on the starting line, and release it. Off it goes. Backwards!
After a good laugh, they return to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong. Surprisingly, they aren't discouraged. They know from watching episodes of PBS's Design Squad that testing and redesigning are vital to solving an engineering problem. In each half-hour episode, the show's teenage cast puts the entire design process into action--define the problem, brainstorm solutions, design, build, test, evaluate, redesign, and finally, share your solution. On the next try, Carl and Maria's car zooms forward. With the first problem solved, they continue to tinker until it works efficiently enough to zip six feet across the floor.
The Rubber-Band Car activity is just one of the Design Squad challenges teachers can use to nurture students' problem-solving and teamwork skills. Whether you're looking for activities to supplement your curriculum or to develop a brand new unit, Design Squad has an array of resources that make it easy to open students' eyes to the exciting world of engineering. Got an hour? A day? A week? Design...
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