Bat Wings Wanted Halloween STEM Challenge Activity

Details

Pages

23 Pages

Subject

Mechanical Engineering, Seasonal

Product

Digital

Grade

2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th

Resource Type

Activities, GATE, Science Centers

Description

Halloween STEM activities keep your kids engaged & learning! Not doing Halloween activities this year? No problem! Just add this to a unit on bats, life science, or as a supplement to "Stellaluna."

Basic Premise:
In this Halloween STEM Challenge, students design and engineer a new set of bat wings, with the goal being to achieve maximum flight distance and/or accuracy. You can even throw in style points, if you like! It's a paper airplane challenge with a twist!

Resource includes:
- NGSS aligned standards, Grades 2 " 8
- Teacher Tips
- Links to a video walk-through of the challenge & my 5-part video series on getting started with STEM challenges
- Premise & Set-up
- Materials and timing
- Modifying Criteria & Constraints to adjust challenge difficulty
- Measuring results
- Post-design extension activities list & links

Student Handouts
- Wingless bat body handouts (2 options provided)
- Criteria & Constraints List (EDITABLE)
- Design Analysis Handouts (2-page regular spacing and 4-page expanded spacing for primary students included) (EDITABLE)
- Discussion Questions (EDITABLE)

Extension templates
- Process Flow Map
- Math Extension

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Sample/suggested materials for each student or group:
(For each student or group)
" Bat Body copies
" Scissors
" Tape measure

Optional:
" tape
" notebook paper

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What are teachers saying about the Wings Wanted Halloween STEM Challenge? (This resource has been selling on other platforms for several years.)

'Easy to implement engineering project- great to keep kids engaged before Halloween!"

"GREAT activity! Bought this to use as a "pop-in parent" activity in a 2nd and 4th grade classroom - it worked so well I'm going to use it in my adult education classroom too! Very adaptable for differentiation!"

'I used this activity with the 1st graders at my school. They loved designing their bat and giving them all different types of wings. [They] loved when we tested the bats to see how far they would fly!"

"I, as a teacher, loved everything about this resource! I haven't done much STEM work in my classes before so this was a perfect introduction for me. It was the first time a lot of my kids encountered something like this, and most were really into it and a small handful found a few frustrations. I was looking for productive struggle, and it was hard for me not to tell the kids what kinds of wings would work! We revisited the activity again after Halloween and I gave them some more info and they were more successful in wing-making. Thank you for this thoughtful activity!" (2nd grade teacher)

"This was a great resource to use with multiple grade levels during Halloween as a stem challenge. Thank you for making it so easy to use!" (2nd - 4th grade teacher)

"I loved the videos included with this project. The amount of material included was wonderful, and the fact that it is all editable made this project well worth it! I did it twice, and my 6th graders loved [it] both times!"

'LOVE! I add in STEM every day - my students had a blast with the Bat Planes. I appreciate the detail and thought that went into these packets. AWESOME RESOURCE!!"

'We used this in our STEM club and all the students enjoyed it." (5th-7th grades)

"Love this holiday twist on the paper airplanes challenge. I'm incorporating it into my ratios unit by asking the students to calculate their bat's speed in meters per second and comparing their designs to one another."