Edison's Toy Studio STEM design challenge

Are you ready to take your students’ engineering skills to a new level? Edison’s Toy Studio is a Project Based Learning unit designed to support electricity and engineering standards for 3rd-6th grade students. Working in small teams, your students will design and build battery-powered toys using components such as motors, switches, and LED light bulbs as well as cardboard and common craft materials. This is not a “cookbook” lesson plan. Each team’s project will be as varied as the interests and imaginations of the kids building it. The design challenge is structured around the engineering design process and spans three 40-minute sessions.

 The lesson is presented in the following manner:

• Session 1: An introduction to the design challenge and brainstorming session. Teams will explore materials and begin building their prototype.
• Session 2: A dedicated building session focused on the engineering design process. Teams explore polarity in the toy’s circuit and experiment with pulleys to control the speed of the motor.
• Session 3: A troubleshooting session to optimize the prototype. If your class project will include a judging panel, teams create a presentation for their toys.

Edison’s Toy Studio design challenge is packed with graphical resources, notebook inserts, and helpful tips from a teacher and engineer. Here's a blog post where we shared tips for using cheap DC motors in STEM projects.

The files that are part of this lesson include:

• Edison’s Toy Studio lesson, part 1
• Edison’s Toy Studio lesson, part 2
• Design Challenge slideshow
• Voltmeter Resource
• Bonus! A step by step instruction booklet for building the Gizmo Rig, a multi-purpose staging platform for STEM projects.