The Brown Bag STEM Challenge- Building Windmills

How about a Brown Bag STEM Challenge about renewable energy?  In this challenge, students use found and recycled items to build a windmill and test its effectiveness.

With students working in collaborative groups, each group will design a windmill that will generate the most energy (aka harnesses the most air and therefore rotates the fastest).   Students can experiment with the size and also the shape of the windmill blades.  To make the activity more challenging for older students, extra requirements can be added.

Once windmills are built, students test their devices and have the opportunity to redesign and/or improve them.   With their final design, teams will compete against each other to see which windmill harnesses the most air!

The Brown Bag STEM Challenge bundle pack includes 10 high-interest design challenges that use low-cost materials that (almost all) fit into a brown bag!  Challenges comes complete with design briefs, STEM notebook pages and a PDF slide deck. In each challenge, students work in teams to design, build and test solutions, following NGSS Engineering Design Performance Expectations.

Get the Brown Bag STEM Challenge Bundle Pack with 10 Design Challenges including Building Windmills!