Australia Safety Capsule STEM Challenge
Take your students on an educational adventure to Australia with this complete lesson! Read the letter from fictitious travel guides explaining the invention of the baby safety capsule (car seat) in Australia.
Grades: Kindergarten - 5th; Homeschool
Teaching Duration: 2 hours
“I used this as part of another STEM project I was conducting in my class and the students had a blast. ”
lesson overview
Australia Safety Capsule STEM Challenge - Engineering Design
Take your students on an educational adventure to Australia with this complete lesson! Read the letter from fictitious travel guides explaining the invention of the baby safety capsule (car seat) in Australia. Students will learn about distributing and absorbing forces as they complete demonstration activities and build their own safety capsule!
Updated to include editable digital journals in Google Slides to support distance learning!
Have you ever tried walking on eggs? Complete this optional activity to demonstrate the advantage to distributing force throughout a structure. Using the engineering design process, student teams are then tasked with designing and building a safety capsule to protect an egg as it is crash tested into a wall!
Students also learn about the STEM careers of safety engineering and marine ecology to bring in real-world STEM connections. The included mission-related math problems extend the learning fun!
As with many STEM activities that are student-driven, this challenge can be tailored to students of various skill levels and abilities.
Included in this product:
Detailed teachers guide with links to resources
Grading rubric for the engineering design process
STEM Career Connections
Demonstration activity instructions
Student handouts to guide them through the engineering design process
Math extension problems
Required Materials for Challenge: Paper/plastic cups, tape, foil, index cards, scissors, straws, craft sticks, pipe cleaners, cotton balls, string, plastic sandwich bags, and eggs.
Looking for more STEM lessons? Find the Vivify resource guide here: bit.ly/VivifyResourceGuide
