LIBRARY UPDATE: “Engineering isn’t as EASY as it can seem”

On Friday we asked our youth to go back in time. How far back? Waaaaaay back. Back to the days of knights, kings and queens. We had them suspend reality [not difficult for kids] and gave them the task of one team creating a castle fortified enough to defend their LEGO king. While the other was busy at work outside the city walls, planning a weapon that could take him out! Each team was given a certain amount of time to complete this task to which then it was open fire. If the attack team successfully knocked out the King, one point, if he stood at the end of the round, one point for the defensive.

The beauty was in between rounds, the teams were allotted a certain amount of time to re-engineer. What a great lesson in designing and improving upon the design. We touched upon this during our summer course of Design Thinking, but here we saw again another real world application when re-designing might come in handy, especially when competition was on the line. And just like computer security vs hacker, it went back and forth based off of learning from each round. The best part about it all, it only took a couple of straws + Strawbee connectors to make this happen.

Check out some of the highlights below: [And don’t forget to join us next week for another edition of Friday Fablab which happens from 1:00pm-2:30 incorporating all things STEAM]