The Brown Bag STEM Challenge- Marshmallow Tower

One of the design challenges in the Brown Bag STEM Challenge Bundle Pack, is the Marshmallow Tower. This simple project is a great way to focus on team-building as students work together to build a tower…out of spaghetti (and a marshmallow)!

The prep for all of the Brown Bag Challenges is easy. Just prepare a brown bag for each team containing the required supplies. Brown bags help to hide the materials students will use and also provide a bit of suspense! Tell students they will be building the tallest structure that they can using the materials in the bag. Work with students to determine the rules for measuring and determining which structure is the tallest.

Working in a team, provide time for students to build the tallest free-standing tower. Then, bring students together to measure the structures. If time permits, students may review the Engineering Design Process and redesign their structures based on the data they gathered while structures were being measured.

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.