Engineering in the Winter Olympics

Friday, February 9th marks the beginning of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. We'll have 242 athletes representing the United States in the winter games competing for gold, silver, and bronze medals. There will be millions of us following the games closely and cheering on the American athletes. One of my favorite events to watch is bobsledding, so I was immediately hooked when I heard about Brooke Brown's bobsled engineering challenge!

If you're not following Brooke Brown, you should stop what you're doing and look her up immediately. She shares a ton of fantastic ideas for integrating STEM into the classroom. Her Teach Outside the Box blog is one of my favorites.

In her bobsled engineering challenge, students first enjoy the book Tacky and the Winter Games where Tacky and his companions train to represent Nice Icy Land in different winter events. One of which being the bobsled-less race. This event is the perfect opportunity for your students to get their engineering on! Using only aluminum foil, 2 straws, 2 toothpicks, a few pieces of tape, scissors and a piece of poster board, challenge your students to create their own bobsled for Tacky!

You can connect this challenge to your math curriculum by requiring your students to measure the distance their bobsled travels using standard or non-standard units of measurement. They could even create a class graph using the data from each team's distance traveled. Brooke has tons of resources to go along with this lesson including vocabulary cards, anchor charts, and nonfiction research that you can pick up from Teachers Pay Teachers here.

This is a great STEM activity to get your students excited about the Winter Olympics. Just make sure Tacky doesn't tumble out of his bobsled!

Shout out to Mrs. Robledo for sharing this idea!

-Clint