The first challenge was to build a simple car that can be powered by wind. Our young engineers started to draw and concept ideas for what such a car could look like. We had cars with sails built from LEGOs, tinfoil, and paper.
Kids who completed the first challenge were given progressively heavier weights, which dramatically changed the difficulty of the challenge, but in a way that was intuitive for kids. For example, to push a heavier car, you need a bigger sail. But to build a bigger sail, you need to reinforce the sail so it stays on your car, build a bigger car, find more efficient tires, with many other solutions waiting to be explored!
After lots of designing and iterating, our young engineers took a break, and began to battle their cars against each other. This again changed the challenge. Weights which made the previous challenge more difficult suddenly became a benefit in the car battle, and kids worked to build cars that could hold as much weight as possible!
This is one of our fun-focused classes, and acts as a lead in to our next class, where we'll be building and optimizing a wind turbine, and measuring the amount of energy generated with a voltmeter!
