C

I started off this week's activity by introducing the Engineering Design Process. We talked about what it's used for and the steps involved. This week's activity was to build a lego tower. The requirements were that the tower's must be at least 4-6 inches tall, must be built using only the lego pieces from their kits and it must be stable and sturdy enough to be able to hold a full water bottle. I had printed out a pre-building worksheet, so that they could understand that they needed to plan out their design first. However, this wasn't very effective at all and because of this i don't plan on continuing with worksheets. They had a lot of difficulty trying to make their tower even 4 inches tall and needed a lot of hints. The students were also reluctant to work together, and I tried to resolve this by having them take turns building.

 

Overall, this activity was successful in that it reinforced the Engineering Design Process. They learned that they may need to redesign and plan out their building strategy before hand.