Today I developed the flow that the 5th-8th grade students will follow as they get better at engineering with popsicle sticks or designing with cardboard.

5th grade will do ‘flash projects’, where they are given a premade mechanism/shape and they customize it with cardboard shapes to make something unique.

6th grade will do the “Level-ups” and “Skill-sprints” as teams. They’ll make the mechanisms and shapes for the 5th graders to use (as practice) and they will practice the ‘project evolutions’ idea that is just being developed.

7th and 8th graders, if they choose to circle back to engineering or designing projects, will have recap videos to help them remember and they will participate in ‘materials fusion’ and ‘projects remix’. I’ll be excited to develop this level next year, too much else is more urgent.

All in all, I hope this is a template that I can re-use or modify for the other creator types. 7th grade will focus on digital creators and coders and 8th grade will focus on entrepreneurship and wordsmithing. With the shorter amounts of time for those last ones, they will not need as many of these special challenges.

Just imagine a student who has progressed through all of these challenges and are working with brainstorming techniques, creator skills, and everything else mentioned above!