Lego Challenge–Hurricane House

This is one I thought of years ago, but never went ahead with, but finally got around to this year. I’ve seen some STEM challenges about building a structure that can survive a “hurricane” but that’s hard to translate that to Legos, so I made it basically into an egg drop challenge, except we’re not dropping anything. And I added some other wringles that I think you’ll like.

So after going over rules, I told them that the challenge would be hurricanes, and that we would be building structures that could survive extreme weather. BUT we wouldn’t be building houses, we would be protecting houses.

I’m attaching my print out, and you can get 3 houses per sheet. My wife, Abby Armour, came up with the idea of printing it on a blue paper, that way any water is going to be easier to see on it. The drawing of the guy is suppose the be me 😛 Here’s my file:

So I told them that their job was to keep their house safe from water, wind, and flooding. And at the end of the hour, we would test to see if your structure could save the house. BUT the kicker was, you didn’t know what kind of test you would get–your weather event would be COMPLETELY RANDOM with a roll of the dice. We did this because, in engineering, you have to plan for everything. And in meteorology, you never really know what’s going to happen until it hits.

I came up with five weather events that either involved dumping water or spraying water in certain spots, our using the fan in certain spots on the piece. The sixth event was all five events at once, which was a favorite. My wife, Abby Armour, also came up with the dice idea. I have a storytime dice I can slide the slips into, so here’s that file if you want it:

At each table I had a weather sheet, which explains each weather event that could occur, and how to potentially avoid it.

Here’s the file to download:

Testing was a lot of fun. I used a squirt gun for “Horizontal Rain”, and a watering can for the flooding and downpour. For “Flooding” I would pour water around the base plate but not directly on their structure, and for “Downpour” I poured water right on their structure. I initially used a hair dryer for the wind, but kids thought that was boring, so I switched to a box fan. So for “Tornado”, air was used on just the top of their structure, while for “High Winds” the fan was used on the sides of the house to see if it would blow away. For the actual tests, I just rolled the big dice to see what would happen, and then did the appropriate test that I mentioned above. For tests involving water, I put everyone’s piece in a wash tub to avoid water getting everywhere. Again, “Everything” was a favorite, and kids loved seeing water getting dumped on what they built.

Overall, everyone did this one, and everyone basically passed their test. Most kids just made big domes. I didn’t tell them they couldn’t do that, but you might want to add something like, you have to leave a window open somewhere for air to get in like in the bottom example, so the “Mr. Peter” drawing doesn’t suffocate. The kids that didn’t pass their test still had fun, and explained that they were planning for the wind, but not whatever they landed on. So everyone had fun and learned something I think. Some kids wanted to do more tests at the end of the hour, and I heard one kid say “I wish we could test more.”

Afterwards every displayed theirs, which is ESSENTIAL for this one. Don’t put wet Legos in your bins or else they’ll get funky. So cleaning up before testing is really important, and making sure that everything can dry out is also important.

Here’s a couple of my favorite designs:

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