Nat Geo Engineering Challenge
Posted on June 25th, 2015 by Mary Lord
How do you study an animal that can’t sit still or an environment so extreme you can’t visit? National Geographic Education’s Engineering Exploration Challenge (NGX) asks children 6 to 18 to follow the engineering design process to develop, build, and test robots to solve big challenges that explorers often face in the field.
Filed under: Competitions and Contests, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Grades K-5, K-12 Outreach Programs, Web Resources | Comments Off on Nat Geo Engineering Challenge
Tags: Competitions for Students, Contest, Design, Engineering Exploration Challenge, National Geographic, Robotics
The Young Mind Awards are a global competition for middle and high school students to inspire interest in becoming innovators and engineers. Teams or individuals design and build a product to solve a problem or improve a process, then demonstrate how it works in a three-minute video presentation. Entries are due May 31, 2015.
Can you build a crazy contraption to clean a chalkboard? that’s the task of this year’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, open to middle school teams as well as high school and college students. Most registration deadlines fall in January and February, 2015. Ready, set, build!
In this short, fun activity for students in grades 2 to 12, teams learn about the engineering design process, including constraints on time and materials, by building the tallest free-standing tower out of pipe-cleaners.
Students in grades 2 to 4 learn about wildlife habitats, environmental engineering, and the complexities of nest construction by attempting to design and build a nest themselves.
The January 2014 eGFI Teachers’ newsletter, “Olympic Engineering,” won one of just 100 Grand Awards in the APEX competition for publication excellence. 
Pairs of students in grades 3 – 5 investigate sound frequencies and acoustic engineering by creating four different instruments – a shoebox guitar, water-glass xylophone, straw panpipe, and soda bottle organ. 
In this activity, students in grades 3 to 6 learn about force and friction by examining how basic rim bicycle brakes work and discussing the advantages of various designs. They then use low cost materials to devise a simple braking system, suggest improvements to current bicycle brake designs, and present their recommended changes to the class.
One day, we may be lugging our own personal wind turbines. International design company frog has unsheathed an umbrella-size, portable wind turbine called Revolver that can generate enough juice from a faint breeze to power a laptop, small light, or radio, or recharge a cellphone or other small electronic gadget.
