engineering Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

STEM Engineering- Houses for the Three Pigs with LEGO

June 13, 2017 By Deirdre

Your children will have a great time doing a STEM engineering project based on a familiar fable. It is always fun to take something familiar like the Three Little Pigs and create something based on it. This STEM engineering project is based on the original version of the tale. You could adapt it to work with other versions of the story if you like.

Getting Ready for This STEM Engineering Project

If you haven’t heard the story of the Three Little Pigs, you may want to read The Three Pigsto them. It will familiarize them with the story and let them see what the houses look like.

Then you will want to print out STEM Engineering – Houses for the Three Pigs Printable and go over it. Your children will need to know what the houses they build will have to have. Please remind them that the building requirements listed are just the minimum. They can add windows, shutters, or actual doors if they like.

Completing the STEM Engineering Activity

House Building

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You or your children will need to gather the base plates (We used gray < gray8×8 base plates as the foundation for our house.), some roof bricks and a variety of bricks the color of each of the houses.

Then it is time to build. Your children may have no trouble building houses that have a roof, a chimney, and four walls. The tricky part may be making the door opening big enough for a small plastic pig to get in and out of.

Recording and Reflecting

When your children have finished their houses, they can fill out the building reflections and the number of bricks sections on the printable.

Brick Count

Finding out which house used the most or fewest blocks will be fun for your children. While each of their houses may look the same, children may have used totally different numbers of bricks to construct them. (Some of that will depend on what size bricks you put out for your kids.)

Building Reflections

It will be interesting to see what your children saw as building or engineering challenges. Some children may share that the planning was the hardest while others may say the constructing was the hardest. Children will reveal what they have learned while completing this STEM engineering challenge when they share what they would do differently.

Children will reveal what they have learned while completing this STEM engineering challenge when they share what they would do differently. It will be interesting to see what your children share.

If you like this LEGO activity, here are some more LEGO activities you will want to look at:

Ocean Themed LEGO Counting Mats

LEGO Geometry Riddles

Easy LEGO Brick Snacks

LEGO Mandala Art

Duplo Washing Bin

Diving and Fishing for LEGO

Engineering for Kids- Printable Building Project Cards

March 30, 2017 By Deirdre

When we were in Baltimore recently, we went to Maryland Science Center. JDaniel and his cousin Charlie had a blast in the building area. Engineering for kids challenges were displayed on signs on the wall. They had a great time trying to create each object with giant blocks.

The story Rex Wrecks It! is about a group of friends that loves to build. Once they have created something, a dinosaur name Rex wrecks it! (Thankfully he learns to play with the other kids instead of knocking things down.) It reminded me of JDaniel and Charlie. They had almost as much fun wrecking their creations as they did building it.

I have created a set of building card that your children can use. It would be fun to read the book Rex Wrecks It! to your children. Then they could try to build each of the twelve objects on the cards. While this is an engineering project, it is also a STEAM activity. Your children will design and create wonderful original objects.

Engineering for Kids Activity and Supplies

There are a wide variety of building supplies you can use to create the object shared on the Building Project Cards.

Here a some that I have though of:

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LEGO
Wooden Blocks
Bristle Blocks
Magna Tiles
Lincoln Logs
Tinker Toys
Empty Boxes from Food Products

Activity Ideas

There are a variety of ways that you can share the building cards with your children.

You can put out one card at a time for them to work on.
You can put out a few cards at a time and have your children pick the project you want them to work on.
You can put the card in a stack and have your children work their way through them.
You can pick a card and have them pick one out for you. Kids will love getting to challenge you to build an object

This engineering for kids activity is part of series of children’s book inspired science activities hosted by Inspiration Laboratories.

Here are some other STEM or STEAM projects we have done:

Tin Foil Boat Ideas for the Penny Challenge

How to Make a Boat with Recycled Materials

STEM Activities-How to Make a Balloon Boat

Plastic Egg Parachutes

Build a Basketball Hoop and a Ball Launching Catapult

STEM Engineering for Kids- Building an Eraser Tower

January 31, 2016 By Deirdre

Are you looking for a fun Valentine’s Day engineering challenge? I have just the one for you. It uses materials that are reasonably priced. We concentrated on building a tower with our materials. You could easily create an engineering for kids challenge that focused on bridge building or creating 3-D shapes.

All you need for this Valentine’s Day engineering challenge are toothpicks and Valentine’s Day themed erasers. (We found packages of 12 erasers for a dollar at Dollar Tree.)

Before we started building our tower we created small holes in the tops and sides of the erasers. Having the holes already in place really helped us when we were ready to build. The holes on the sides of the erasers did not go all the way through them. The holes on the top did go through to the bottom. We later added more holes where we discovered we needed them.

We started by talking about building a strong foundation. It was decided that we would place tooth picks going from the side of one shape to another. We could have added them going diagonally, but we decided that the tower would be stable enough.

Then we created a second square on the table with toothpicks and erasers. When it was assembled, we added toothpicks on the top of the erasers in that square.

The second square was held upside down over the first square. The vertical toothpicks were than placed into the holes in the center of the bottom square.

When that was done, we had created a cube!

On top of the cube we added the roof of the tower. Just as we did with the second square we placed the tooth picks in the eraser that would be the pinnacle of the building. That eraser section was than turned upside down. The tooth picks were then attached to the second square.

More STEM Engineering for Kids Activities

LEGO Groundhog Shadow Experiment

LEGO Snowflake Patterns

Snowflake Patterns with Blocks

STEM Engineering Bridge Building

You can find even more STEM engineering and science activities on my Early Learning Science board on Pinterest.

STEM Engineering- Bridge Building

October 28, 2015 By Deirdre

JDaniel loves to build so; recently took him aside and posed a building question to him. I asked him how we can get some farm animals across a busy road. His answer was that we needed to build a bridge.

I gathered together some toys and some build materials that we could use to build the bridge.

What was gathered?

Small potato chip containers
Paper clips
Hole punch
Strips of cardboard
Train track
Plastic farm animals
Toy cars

How we put the bridge together:

Two holes were punched in each potato chip container. One hole close to the rim of the container and one beneath the first hole.
Holes were punched into the cardboard strips. Two near the front of the strip. One hole was placed on the right and one on the left. Two holes were placed in the back of each strip one on each side.
The end of a paperclip was threaded through the holes in each of the cans.
The end of a paperclip was threaded through the holes in each of the cardboard strips.

STEM Engineering Project Bridge Building Questions

How many paper clips need to be added to the ones hanging from the cans before connecting them to the cardboard strip?
How far apart do the cans need from the bridge to keep them flat on the ground?
How many animals can fit on each of the cardboard strips while keeping the cans flat?
What amount of space needs to between each animal?
Which bridge is the easiest for the animals to cross?
Do you need to add more paperclips to the narrowest cardboard bridge?

You don’t have to explore each of these questions. You can just pick one or two. As my son was building, I posed these questions organically. Each of these could be the essential question for the STEM Engineering project.

We did a lot of higher level thinking in this engineering project. We found that the bridge needs to be able to swing for it to work well with animals traveling on it.

It was such fun to build a variety of bridges and see which worked best. After completing our investigation, I placed all the building supplies in a basket in my son’s room. I was thrilled to later see him exploring more ways to build bridge with the materials when I peeked in his room.

Here are some other fun experiments we have done:

Blowing Up a Balloon on a Bottle

How to Make Things Sink

How to Make Water Flow

If you try this STEM engineering project, please share a picture of your bridge with me on my Facebook page.