Design a Car Engineering Design Challenge | 1st Grade STEM Discoveries

Design a Car Engineering Design Challenge | 1st Grade STEM Discoveries

Rev up your STEM classroom with the Design a Car STEM Challenge! Students will step into the shoes of engineers as they explore the evolution of cars, uncover the secrets of speed, and build their own dream vehicle! Using If I Built a Car as inspiration, learners will discover that problems can have multiple solutions, just like real-world engineering.

Students will use common materials to construct a working model of a car, mastering the art of building a wheel and axle that moves. They’ll experiment with speed, weight, and incline, gaining real-world engineering intuition in a fun and interactive way. This unit is part of our new 1st grade STEM Discoveries series!

What They’ll Learn:

• How engineers design cars and how vehicles have evolved over time

• The wheel and axle as a simple machine and its role in motion

• The relationship between weight, speed, and incline (because physics makes a difference!)

• How to define a problem before designing a solution

• The importance of different car parts working together to create a functional design

STEM Discoveries Storyline (Adaptable for Grades 1 - 2): Terra (a robot) arrives in the present because her futuristic world is missing some important things - creativity, curiosity, and the spirit of exploration! Her sensors picked up signs of innovation coming from your classroom. Terra’s mission: Learn from the students and discover STEM knowledge and inventions to bring back to the future!

A Mission to Design a Dream Car: In this unit, students will learn about common characteristics of cars and their development over history. Students will read If I Built A Car (watch on YouTube or read the physical book) to recognize that problems can have multiple solutions. Students will then design and build their own dream car!

Engineering Learning Goals in this unit include:

• Real-World Connections: Understand that engineers design cars and identify how real cars have changed over time.

• Making: Use common materials to build a car model and learn to successfully make a moving wheel and axle.

• Habits of Mind: Recognize that problems have multiple solutions and that you must first define the problem before you can start on the solution.

• Science: Identify the wheel and axle as a simple machine. Build intuition on the relationships between weight vs. speed and angle vs. speed, including that a car moves with a wheel and axle and goes faster on a steeper incline.

• Technology: Understand that a car has different characteristics, such as wheels, axles, and shapes, and recognize that a car has different parts that work together.

• Math: Recognize fast versus slow speeds as well as heavier objects. Understand how speed is related to time.

Included in this product:

• Aligned to: NGSS, TEKS, and ITEEA Standards

• Complete Teacher Guide following the engineering design process

• Materials list and activity suggestions

• Editable teaching slides

• Student handouts for each phase of the design process, including science background, STEM career connection, and more!

• Two versions of student badges for completing the mission: pre-colored or a black and white option for students to color themselves to celebrate!

Recommended Supplies:

Required:

• 4 Foam wheels

• 2 Craft Dowels or long toothpicks

• 1 straw

• 2 Craft Sticks

• 18” Masking tape

Additional Options;

• 6” square of Foil

• 1 sheet of cardstock or Construction paper 

• 2 index cards

• Cardboard

2021 Science TEKS Standards Alignment (Texas)

• Practices: 1.2(C/E), 1.3(A/B/C), 1.4(A)

• Content: 1.5(A)