Design a Recycling Game
Posted on April 18th, 2022 by Mary Lord
Students in grades 3-5 brainstorm ideas for board game formats. They then work in teams to design, create, and test games in which players must think of alternative uses (recycling) for used products.
Filed under: Class Activities, Grades K-5, Lesson Plans | Comments Off on Design a Recycling Game
Tags: Class Activities, Curriculum, Engineering Design, Environmental Engineering, game, Grades K-5, Lesson Plan, Recycling, systainability
Engineers are reimagining product design to reduce waste, improve recycling, and protect the environment from planned obsolescence.
The road to a greener future may start in northwest England’s Cumbria county, where plastic litter is turning up in an unusual new place: street pavements.
In this activity, teams of middle school students express their creativity while learning the fundamentals of engineering design, sustainability, and the basic physics of forces and motion by building a vehicle out of recycled trash that is capable of transporting liquid over rough terrain with as little spillage as possible.
Student teams use the engineering design process to create a useful product of their choice out of recyclable items and “trash.” The class is given a “landfill” of reusable items and allowed a limited amount of bonding materials. The activity addresses the importance of reuse and encourages students to look at ways they can reuse items they would normally throw away. Students are further prompted to consider the problems with growing landfills, and efforts by engineers and others to reduce pollution, emissions, and trash production.
From helping impoverished trash workers in Argentina to transforming the way Canadian engineering students learn, Caroline Baillie has been a tireless champion of fostering social justice through engineering, challenging her colleagues and students to make ethics a core concern in their work.
For residents of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Blue Mountain is a scar on the landscape and a health hazard. But for 120 sixth graders at Eyer Middle School in Macungie, Pa., Blue Mountain became a laboratory for understanding the nation’s problems with toxic waste and ways to clean it up.
In this activity, students in grades 3-5 collect, categorize, weigh and analyze classroom solid waste. The class collects waste for a week, and then student groups spend a day sorting and analyzing the garbage with respect to recyclable and non-recyclable items. Students will discuss ways that engineers have helped to reduce solid waste.
