Teaching about ecology and local history with an engineering challenge! I'm sure most people know what the egg drop challenge is. Students are given a limited amount of supplies and are tasked with creating a container that will protect an egg from breaking when dropped from a height.
I added a twist to this!
There is an interesting bit of local history that I tied into this engineering challenge. In the early 1940's the US Forest Service parachuted beavers into the Idaho back country! Seriously! As the town of McCall was becoming more settled the local beavers were becoming a nuisance. The towns people wanted them gone! Because there were (and are!) no road into the Idaho wilderness the most cost effective way to deal with the beaver problem was to design and build a self releasing crate that would allow beavers to be dropped out of planes to their new homes. The biologists saw this as a win win/ The towns fold would be placated and the beavers would create habitat for fish and waterfowl. Read the fill story here:
The kids had a blast creating and dropping their beaver transport contraptions!
This activity gave us the opportunity to discuss ecology and how beavers can change a landscape; how humans impact the natural world, as well as experience the engineering process. We discussed how it is important to test prototypes and make adjustments, we also made a hypotheses about the fate of our "beaver," and why we thought our "beaver" would survive or perish, before we dropped.
When it was all said and done I facilitated a discussion about what they would do differently if they were to create their designs again. This gave the students an opportunity to analyze the results of their drop and think critically about their work.
This was a VERY successful activity!