The Bown Bag STEM Challenge II- Building Boxes

Building Boxes is a deceptively easy task- design and build a box that will hold the most volume. Easy, right? Not so much.

I prefer partners for this exercise so that both students can be fully engaged. The older students will most likely do some calculations to maximize the volume and then fold and tape their box. As a result, I like to provide them less time than normal, making speed and careful decisions a factor. Younger students will generally use a trial and error approach, so have lots of the same size and type of paper handy.

With older students, I use this as an introduction challenge and then challenge each team to come up with the container (meaning any shape) that will hold the most volume. This variation is a nice review of different volume formulas.

A variation for younger students is to use centimeter cubes or packing peanuts to determine the volume instead of having them do the calculations.

The Brown Bag STEM Challenge design challenges focus on some key STEM concepts like critical thinking and problem solving, all while being low-cost to implement. This sequel series contains all of the same elements (design briefs, NGSS alignment, Interactive STEM Notebook pages, etc.) as the original, but with new challenges!

So, what did we learn?
Next Generation Science Standards: SEP- Developing and Using Models, Planning and Carrying Out Investigation, Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking; CCC- Patterns, Scale, Proportion and Quantity

CCSS Math: Operations and Algebraic Thinking, Measurement and Data, Geometry, Ratios and Proportional Relationships

Other Skills- Team-building, cooperative learning, decision making, data-collecting