Each month our team highlights three engineering activities that pair the Engineering Design Process with open-ended questions and invite students to Discover Engineering. In November, let’s talk Towers!
Tallest Cup Tower
Students as young as kindergarten can learn all about forces, stability, gravity, and the importance of structural planning in this activity that can be as short as a free exploration table, or as long as a few class periods for older middle school students!
Slender Tower
Taking the tower building another step further, teams plan out and build the tallest tower they can with the smallest footprint possible, using only the materials provided while considering the forces at work on buildings, including wind and earthquakes.
Newspaper Tower
As students make the tallest tower possible out of a couple of sheets of newspaper, students discover basic construction concepts such as the forces acting on the tower, the impact of shape on the strength of a material, and the importance of distributing weight to create stability.
As always don’t forget to share photos of the towers your students build! You can tag us on all social media @DiscoverEOrg!