Engineering Design Challenges

Your Work is Inspiring

Work with the Iridescent team to turn your daily work into an engineering design challenge.

You will develop a hands-on design challenge — a project for children and their families to build over the course of a few hours, using simple materials found at home. Each challenge explores a key science and engineering concept a concept distilled from the work you do every day.

For instance, Google Loon is trying to develop a mesh network using enormous balloons to deliver the internet to more remote areas. Working with engineer Anton Staaf, we developed this challenge to engineer a balloon helicopter that is powered by a propeller — reflecting the real-life challenge of controlling Google Loon balloons.

Iridescent will work with you to distill the work you do every day to create a design challenge that explores the key physics concepts at play. This design challenge will be used in our in-person programs and will also be uploaded to curiositymachine.org for wider access.

Time Commitment: 10 hours / 1 month

Your next challenge: Developing Engineering Design Challenges for Curiosity Machine

Every design challenge featured on Curiosity Machine is based on the daily work of professional scientists and engineers, and each challenge breaks down a complex concept into a hands-on design challenge that explores that concept through the process of building a working model. It might seem straightforward, but consider the following questions:

What’s the problem you’re working on now? What concepts are you exploring? Can you break them down into smaller concepts, so that a 3rd grader could understand them? Can you create a challenge that helps that 3rd grader explore those concepts? Can you build a solution to that problem using simple materials like rubber bands, straws, or popsicle sticks? Does this challenge have more than one solution — is there more than one way to build it? Can it be built with other materials? Can the challenge be completed in 50 minutes? Is the challenge age-blind (meaning different ages can address the challenge with their own solutions and skills)?

You will be asked to address all of these elements as you develop a design challenge to share on Curiosity Machine!

The Engineering Design Process

We teach the engineering design process in our programs, and emphasize it in our design challenges because we believe it is crucial to promoting persistence, as it implicitly has a component of failure and redesign embedded in it. We want to lead children through the following steps:

Inspiration – outline the problem, goal, challenge or constraints.
Plan – sketch out ideas for solutions. sketching out a solution forces children to think through various parts and functions of their design before building.
Build – create the model or project within the given constraints.
Test – try it out and make observations of what occurred. children should use their observations to draw conclusions of what worked and did not work and why.
Redesign – make it better! children should attempt to rebuild their design at least once to improve it. in the Curiosity Machine, children can go through steps Build, Test and Redesign as many times as needed until they are satisfied with the results and feel they have met their goal or solved the challenge.
Reflect – Wrap up! Children should reflect on what they have learned and accomplished. In the Curiosity Machine, in this step children also publish their designs to an Inspiration Gallery where other children can see their invention and use it as further inspiration.

EDP