Design Process - Boat Building

As part of our first Science unit on States of Matter, we discussed the concepts of floating and sinking.  Each child was given the task to build a boat from a tub of supplied materials. The rubric below was introduced so students would know what they were expected to do and could check back with it as they were working.

Before they could dig in and start building, a yellow sheet like the examples below needed to be completed to show their plan.  Many of the students changed their original plan as they went, a move that is encouraged if the plan is not working like you thought it would.

After two days of building and testing, it was time to prove that their boats were built using at least four different  materials, were colourful and could hold 20 pennies without sinking.  

Everyone was successful and so to take it one step further, we used the weights from the Science lab to see how many grams each boat could hold.   Ask your child how much weight his/her boat could hold.  What an exciting way to end the unit!