Overview

In this fun engineering lesson plan, your students will build rubber band-powered cars using readily available craft supplies. The challenge is to build a car that goes as far as possible while making careful use of materials. Middle school and high school versions of this lesson plan are also available. This lesson was part of the 2024 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge.

Note for K-2 teachers: you can do this challenge with younger students too! Contest entry is open to all K-12 students. You may need to adapt the lesson materials based on your students' reading abilities. Younger students might need help with some tasks like cutting certain materials or calculating their scores. You can also find NGSS engineering standards for K-2 listed here.

Learning Objectives

• Make designs for a device based on specific criteria
• Choose which design will perform better based on the criteria
• Build and iteratively test a device

NGSS Alignment

This lesson helps students prepare for these Next Generation Science Standards Performance Expectations:

• 3-5-ETS1-2. Generate and compare multiple possible solutions to a problem based on how well each is likely to meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.

This lesson focuses on these aspects of NGSS Three Dimensional Learning:

Science & Engineering Practices Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions. Generate and compare multiple solutions to a problem based on how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the design problem.

Disciplinary Core Ideas ETS1.B: Developing Possible Solutions. At whatever stage, communicating with peers about proposed solutions is an important part of the design process, and shared ideas can lead to improved designs.

Crosscutting Concepts Scale, Proportion, and Quantity. Standard units are used to measure and describe physical quantities such as weight, time, temperature, and volume.

Materials

To enter your students' designs in the 2024 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge, you can only use the following materials.

You can use the following tools for building and testing your car (they cannot be used as part of the car):

• Scissors
• Hobby or Xacto knife
• Ruler
• Pencil or pen (for drawing lines for cutting, does not count toward material cost if not used as part of the car)
• Tape measure
• Optional: drill and drill bits (useful for drilling round holes in bottle caps)
• Optional: file or sandpaper (useful for smoothing rough edges of drilled holes)
• Optional: markers or crayons for decorating your car (cannot be used as parts of the car)