Design and Engineering Introduction

We have begun our unit on all things construction, Design and Engineering. In this unit we have and will talk about buildings, constructing, tools, materials, famous structures, stability, and many other facets of design and engineering.

We wanted to begin with a fun activity to get them used to handling tools. We gave our students real tools. With Valentines Day just passing, we decided to have fun with some left over conversation hearts.

Beginning with safety, we talked about each tool and how they're used. Then we gave them minimal instruction about how to break the candies. We wanted to see what the students did with the tools, how they used them, if they used multiple strategies to solve the problem of breaking the hearts into smaller pieces, the vocabulary they would use and what they would predict.

The hearts were in between two pieces of paper towel so that broken bits didn't fly everywhere.

We used hammers.

We used screwdrivers.

We tried different ways to use the screwdriver.

We even tried breaking them with our hands.

After spending some time with conversation hearts, we tried breaking different types of food; we added M&Ms and chips to our trays.