In this design challenge, students will receive a problem inspired by the story Jack and the Beanstalk by Carol Ottolenghi. In the story, Jack climbs a magical beanstalk where he finds a castle that he steals several items from before returning home. The students will be presented with the following problem: “Jack wants to go back to the castle in the sky to return the hen and the harp he stole, but he is out of magic beans. He does not know how he will get back to the castle. Today, you are going to put on your engineering hat to help Jack build a “beanstalk” that can reach all the way to the giant’s castle in the sky so he can return the stolen items.” Students will engage in a STEM challenge to build the tallest structure in 25 minutes that can hold a toy figure (Jack) for one minute. Teams will receive bonus points if their structure can withstand a 30-second windstorm before Jack safely returns to his home on the ground.
Students will perform protein purification using column chromatography to gain a greater understanding of the biomanufacturing process of going from a cell to a protein to a product.
In this activity, students will use computational thinking to write a code sequence for a drone to survey an arctic map. This activity is based on the work done by Northrop Grumman in Operation Polar Eye.
