Need some quick and easy STEM challenges for your classroom? Tower challenges are great go-to STEM activities that promote problem solving, teamwork, and communication. You can create these challenges out of almost anything: index cards, playing cards, blocks, newspaper, or plastics cups. Here are two fun tower challenges that my middle school students love!
Balloon Tower Challenge
Kids love balloons! Your classroom will feel like a party when they get to work! The engineering mission is to build the tallest, freestanding tower using a bag of balloons and masking tape. Students must work together to blow up the balloons and find a way to hold them together for a tower. Remind students the importance of a sturdy base and time management. Projecting a timer for no more than 12 minutes will keep the students focused on building. At the end, walk around and measure the different heights while pointing out the differences in structures.
Balloon tower challenge
Pipecleaner Tower Challenge
The Pipecleaner Challenge is one of my favorite team-building icebreaker activities because of unexpected obstacles added during the building process. Plus all you need is 15 pipe cleaners per team of 2 – 4 students.
Pipecleaner Tower Challenge
Pass out pipecleaners to each group and inform them that their engineering team has been assigned an important mission: to build the tallest, free-standing tower with only materials provided.
Allow students to begin working for a few minutes. Soon they will figure out that they need a strong base to hold the flimpsy pipecleaners, and that means it is time to add an unexpected twist!
Yell “FREEZE”, and as students look up in surprise, inform teams that there has been an unexpected loss of resources in the company. Each team member must now place one arm behind their back and keep working! After some giggling, they will quickly learn that they have to work together to keep building. Give teams several minutes to struggle together, and then yell “FREEZE” again! As students groan, inform teams that their engineering manager realized the challenges with this loss in resources. To compensate, you are outsourcing some of the engineering work to {insert favorite county}. However, not everyone speaks the same language. Teams can use both arms, but must continue without speaking!
After a few more minutes (in silence), yell that business is booming, and translators have been hired. Teams have 2 minutes to complete the task! At the end of the time, walk around and measure tower heights and point out differences between designs.
Want more?
We have created a bundle of STEM Icebreaker activities that includes this Pipecleaner Challenge along with discussion questions, a teacher’s guide, and more to implement this activity in your classroom! The bundle includes the Chair Challenge, another simple mini-STEM challenge to promote team-building using the engineering design process. We also added four STEM critical thinking activities to introduce students to scientific and engineering thinking through exploration of the world around them. We hope your students enjoy these activities!
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