This is an inexpensive STEM Challenge! In this activity students will work in groups to design and build a small boat from aluminum foil. The best design for an aluminum foil boat would be to try to make it cover as much area as possible. Pennies are the only item you may add to your boat. Rules: Your boat must be made ONLY out of the one piece of aluminum foil provided by your teacher. The weight of a penny is 2.75 grams. Count pennies into one tin foil boat, making tallies until the boat sank Repeat with nickels, dime, and quarters into the other tin foil boats Compare the different tally marks to see which boat needed to least coins to sink and the most coins to sink Students will be constructing a boat out of aluminum foil to hold the most amount of pennies. Which volume do you think will They were given the opportunity to design and test their boat before the class contest. Therefore this container could hold 150.3 grams less the weight of the foil itself and still remain boyant. DESIGN CHALLENGE MATERIALS Supplies and Equipment: ☐ Shallow plastic bin ☐ Water ☐ owelsT ☐ Pennies (several hundred) or other weights ☐ Optional: pictures of different kinds of boats Consumables: ☐ Aluminum foil Challenge: Using only a piece of aluminum foil, 2 balloons, 2 popsicle sticks, and a piece of tape construct a boat that will hold the most number of pennies and still stay afloat. With simple aluminum foil pieces, design a boat with your child and see how many pennies it can hold before it sinks! Encourage them to be creative. They were asked to design a boat out of a 12″x 12″ piece of aluminum foil that would hold the most pennies. The only question is whether the sides would be sturdy enough to hold back the pressure of the water without collapsing. Many moons ago, when I was in high school, my English teacher gave us an assignment to try and build a boat out of two sheets of aluminum foil that were each 2 square feet in area (1'x2'). It works as a great cooperative learning experience! Jul 24, 2017 - Challenge your children to try out a few tin foil boat ideas that they think will work well for the STEM penny challenge. The container will theoretically hold a maximum of 54 pennies. In this activity, you'll make little "boats" out of aluminum foil to explore how their size and shape affects the amount of weight they carry and how this relates to water density. Today we began looking at the data using a spreadsheet in Google Drive. Penny Boat Lab. Whichever boat was able to support the most weight wins. Before you get started, create a hypothesis. Design and build a boat from aluminum foil that can hold as many pennies as possible before sinking or capsizing. Sixth graders are in the middle of our first engineering design project. You can give a prize for the winner..either candy or homework passes (see my homework passes in my store)! 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