Aluminum Foil Boat Design: Surviving the Stormy Seas

Background Information for Teachers

Building small boats out of aluminum foil and testing to see how much weight, typically in the form of pennies, the boats can hold before sinking is a classic science activity (Figure 1). It teaches students about physics concepts like buoyant force and density and engineering design as they work iteratively to improve their boats. (See the Additional Background section for more details).

Image Credit: Ben Finio, Science Buddies / Science Buddies
Figure 1. The classic "aluminum foil boats and pennies" project.

In this lesson plan, we take a twist on the boat building activity to add some additional engineering steps and real-world context, and encourage students to exercise their problem-identification and solving skills. This lesson is anchored in the fact that humans have been using boats for transportation for thousands of years—and boats have always been vulnerable to sinking, resulting in loss of human life.

Modern technologies like GPS, radar, weather forecasting, and radio communication have made boating safer. However, in recent years, many migrants fleeing war-torn countries have resorted to very dangerous journeys on overloaded, poor-quality boats that can easily capsize or sink in stormy seas (see New York Times article in Additional Background section). This provides a pertinent real-world application for this project. Instead of testing the boats in still water, your students will test them in "stormy seas" by dropping a ball into the water to create waves. Will an overloaded boat sink easily? Can they do anything to solve this problem? Try this lesson to help students understand how engineering can impact people's lives.

Additional Background Links

• Efforts to Rescue Migrants Cause Deadly, Unexpected Consequences, New York Times
• Disasters at Sea: 6 Deadliest Shipwrecks, Live Science
• What is buoyant force?, Khan Academy
• The Engineering Design Process, Science Buddies

Prep Work (5 minutes)

• Fill your tubs about halfway with water. If the tubs are shallow, lay towels underneath them to catch any splashed water (or, if feasible, do the project outside). One tub can be used for testing with still water, and one for testing with waves.
• Optional: the day before the lesson, as a homework assignment, ask your students to find one recent news article about a shipwreck or boating disaster, and find out what caused it (see Engage section).

Engage (10 minutes)

This might seem unusual for a science lesson, but start this class out with a discussion of current events. Ask your students if they have seen or read anything in the news about a recent shipwreck or boat-related disaster (not a famous historical one like the Titanic), especially those related to boats overloaded with migrants fleeing war-torn countries (see Teacher Background section). If you have internet access in your classroom, you can let students search for recent news articles online. You could also assign this as homework the day before the lesson. As a class, discuss the causes of the accidents. How many of them were caused by stormy conditions or unsafe or overloaded boats? (Note that there may be accidents with other causes, like navigation errors that resulted in crashing into rocks or another boat). Why would people need to resort to using unsafe/overloaded boats in stormy conditions when we have safer boats available?

Explain that in today's lesson, we will model this situation using aluminum foil boats and pennies to represent "passengers," and will treat it like an engineering design problem. However, you will not be telling the students exactly what to do—first, you will discuss how to define the problem as a class.

Explore (40 minutes)

1. As a class, define the real-world problem that needs to be solved. Then, define the criteria and constraints of that problem as they apply to your aluminum foil boat model. You will need to be specific about defining the problem, and the details will depend on your materials and individual setup. You may need to provide some guidance for your students given practical limitations on available materials or time. For example guiding questions and possible answers, see Table 1.

2. Discuss whether your model is realistic. Does it have any limitations? How similar is it to the real-world scenario? Is there anything we should agree to change before we start the experiment?
3. Individually, students should draw several ideas for boat designs on their worksheets. How do they plan to fold the boats? What will the final shape be? How will the boat's shape help it accomplish its goals, like holding the weight of the pennies, or not being sunk by large waves?
4. In pairs, students should now compare the designs they drew. They will need to decide on one design to build. Can they agree on a single best design? Can they combine or modify any of their designs to arrive at one that is potentially better?
5. Once they have picked a design, they will need to build and test it. Pause to discuss the testing procedure as a class. Explain that students will be given multiple opportunities to test and redesign/rebuild their boats. Do they want to jump directly to dropping the ball while the boat holds 10 pennies? Or do they want to try a more incremental approach? For example, you could first test an empty boat to make sure the design floats, then test it with 10 pennies in still water, and then test it with 10 pennies and waves.
6. Allow students to test their boats, then redesign and retest as needed (limited based on your available time). They should document problems they encounter and design changes in their worksheets. Do they manage to improve their design's performance on successive iterations?
7. Pause to discuss what causes the boats to sink. Do the boats tend to sink quickly (e.g. they are swamped by a single large wave), or slowly over time (water splashes in from multiple small waves)? What is the physical threshold that must be crossed for the boat to sink (the boat's weight, including the pennies and any water inside it, must exceed the buoyant force, which is equal to the weight of the water the boat displaces)?
8. Once each pair of students has finalized their design, conduct "official" testing using the agreed-upon standard procedure. Keep track of which boats sink and which ones do not.
9. Now for the really fun part! Decide how you will test the boats under increasingly severe conditions (for example, by adding more pennies, making bigger waves by dropping the ball from a higher height, or both). Keep track of the results quantitatively for each boat, and keep going until are the boats are sunk. Which boat survived the biggest storm?

Reflect (10 minutes)

Discuss the results as a class. All the boats were tested in the same conditions—how did they perform? Did some succeed while others failed? Why or why not? Did the successful designs have anything in common? What about the unsuccessful designs? What would they change about their boats if they had more time or materials available?

Assess

• Collect the student worksheets and use them to assess how systematic your students were with the engineering design process.
• Ask your students to write a paragraph explaining, based on the results of their experiment, what they think can be done to solve the real-world problem of people drowning when overloaded boats sink.

Make Career Connections

Discussing or reading about these careers can help students make important connections between the in-class lesson and STEM job opportunities in the real world.

Marine Engineer and Naval Architect

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Career Profile

Marine architects design boats and other types of ocean-going vessels like submarines, oil platforms, and underwater robots. They can help design boats that can more safely transport large numbers of people. Read more

Lesson Plan Variations

• Put a competitive twist on this lesson by trying the EPAM engineering mini-challenges version.
• Try this activity with materials other than aluminum foil to build the boats. For example, you can use corks, wooden craft sticks, and rubber bands to make rafts.