These videos will help you make your catapult. And, they can help you make your catapult better!

You collected data throughout these challenge. Share a big picture of your beautiful data.

If you share it with us, we will use it to help other people learn from your successes.

Have you talked about forces in school yet? If so, you are in luck because we are about to talk a lot about forces.

Boats float because water pushes up on the bottom of the boat. You also know another force that affects boats: gravity. Gravity pushes down on boats while water pushes up.

You may hear about Archimedes Principle. Over 2000 years ago, Archimedes found a simple way to figure out if boats float. It has three steps:

1. Determine the weight of the boat.
2. Determine the weight of the water the boat moves out of the way.
3. If the water weighs less than the boat, then it will sink.

This relationship also shows that if a boat is floating, then it moves exactly that weight of water away.

Here is a great video that shows this relationship and its interesting history.

In FLEET, you can see the forces of gravity and forces of buoyancy whenever your ship is on the water.

These kits allow students to truly engineer. This means they draw a design, make their design, test it, collect the data, and then start the process again. These kits will take between 30-75 minutes for most children.

If you are looking for classroom or group use, consider buying kits and our 12-week STEM clubs for:

• Elementary School STEM Clubs
• Middle School STEM Clubs

Love this stuff? Join our STEM of the Month club to easily receive (or gift) a mega-pack of engineering each month.

Just exploring? Return to the home page to see other edMe opportunities.

Please upload your Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone(TM) projects here if you would like to share them with our community of Potter fans. We hope you had fun completing it (and you fell more in love with this story!!)

You see rain every day! Rain is water falling from the sky. How does water get up there?

You can complete the activity below to find out. You can also watch this video for helpful information!

Want to jam out!?!? Learn the Water Cycle song.

It’s a robot! It’s a hand! It’s something you can make yourself!

Ilyssia is our expert Robot Hand engineer. Here is her quick description of the process.

First, I traced the shape of my hand onto the cardboard with all fingers spread apart. Don’t forget to add some space at the bottom for your wrist! I exaggerated the shape of my fingers (I made my fingers much bigger than they are!). My “super sized” fingers gave me room for the materials that would go on top of them.

Second, I cut out the shape I just drew on the cardboard.

Third, I have to make the fingers bend. So, I drew 2 lines on the thumb. I drew one line in the middle of my thumb cut out and one line at the bottom of the thumb cut out. These lines show where the joints will be. The finger joints are very similar, but there are three joints so each finger needs three lines.

Fourth, fold each line down on every finger and the thumb. Fold them back so the entire hand is open. (But now the fingers are more flexible!)

Straws & Strings – The tendons of the robotic hand

Fifth, take a straw and cut a piece for each section of the fingers and thumbs. They will have different lengths, but they are pretty short. My shortest straw was 0.5 inches (pinky finger!), but some straws were up to 2 inches long. The length of the straw depends on the distance between your folds.

Sixth, tape these straws to their proper section.

Seventh, cut more straws for the palm of the robotic hand. Tape these pieces in the palm area, not too far from the finger it will control. Point the other end of the straw toward the center of the wrist.

Eighth, cut one last piece of straw about 2 inches long. Tape it on the wrist so half of the straw sticks off the cutout.

Ninth, gather 5 pieces of string. Slide the string through all fingers, but leave a little extra at the top. Then, tape this extra piece on the back of each finger.

Tenth, push the ends of the string in the palm through the last straw piece on the wrist.

Finally, cut out about 2-3 inches of cardboard to hold your hand with (HA a pun).

Experiment with where you want to put this last piece of cardboard. You may like it in front of your hand (on the same side as the palm). Or, you may like it more on the other side of the hand where it will provide more support.

Now, when you pulling all the strings you can watch your robotic hand move!

Materials

If you bought one of our kits, you are in luck! You have a firm, thin piece of cardboard that we think is best. We also provided a much sturdier cardboard as the packaging. Finally, you will see that there is cardstock as well. See below for Ilyssia’s expert analysis of these materials; we suggest doing an initial test with the cardstock and then use the thin cardboard for your best design. If you want to make a sturdier hand or need more materials, take our box apart!

If you are finding additional supplies, we suggest cereal boxes and other boxes of that thickness. They provide the right strength without being too hard to manipulate like a shipping box.

Thoughts on Shipping Box Cardboard

Starting with this type of cardboard made it even more difficult. I cut the fingers too close together and the friction between the fingers made it hard for them to move. And, it was very hard to cut out in the shape I wanted.

Thoughts on Shipping Box Cardboard

The regular brown paper was easy to cut out. But, the brown paper is too weak to pick anything up so it isn’t useful either. 

Thoughts on using Paper

card stock paper which was the easiest material. Making the fingers large and spreading them apart really helped in making the robot. I switched to burlap instead of the elastic string so moving the fingers was easy. Also, I put the card board piece on the back of the wrist rather than the front to hold the robot a different way.

Great work completing your Tall Tower engineering challenge!! Click here to earn 150 brainpowers for your successful building adventure.

Think about everything you did! There were successes, problems, solutions (and then more problems!). You kept working hard and got to the end. Nicely done!

We will be updating this page with successful towers that reach for the sky. Here are some of our favorites so far! If you want your tower here, scroll to the bottom and upload a picture of your Tall Tower!