Paper Roller Coasters — Wild Marble Tracks

Real engineers add curves, bumps, and friction to control how fast something moves. Today you will iterate on your track to slow a ping pong ball down as much as possible.

Hook: Use only gravity, paper, and tape to design the slowest roller coaster on Earth.

Seven Minutes of Terror — Mars Perseverance Landing

Every Mars rover NASA has ever launched started as a cardboard mock-up. Engineers test wheel shapes, axles, and energy storage long before they build the real thing. Today you will do the same job: build a rubber-band-powered rover that scrambles across the floor.

Hook: If you are building a vehicle for the Moon or Mars, there are no gas stations. How will you power your ride?

C-17 Humanitarian Air Drop

When earthquakes, floods, or war cut roads off, supplies have to be dropped from the air. The drop has to be safe, gentle, and accurate. Today you will design a device that drops a small cup of water 7 to 9 feet without spilling it.

Hook: Think like a disaster relief engineer. Can you deliver life-saving supplies from the air without losing a drop?

Curiosity Rover: Here's the Scoop

Sometimes engineers need to pick up an object they cannot touch with their hands: a chemical spill, a hot piece of metal, a sample on Mars. They build a tool that reaches, grips, or scoops from a distance.

Hook: Rescue a fragile sample from a hazard zone without ever stepping inside.

Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot — Fully Electric

Your hand has bones for support, joints for bending, and tendons that pull on those bones to move your fingers. Engineers copy this design when they build robot arms for nuclear plants, deep-sea drilling, and space stations. Look at your own finger right now. Where does it bend? That is where you will build a joint.

Hook: Build a surrogate arm that can do a job too dangerous for human hands.

STEM Challenge: How Much Weight Can Paper Hold?

A table looks simple, but it has a tough job. It has to hold things up off the ground without bending or collapsing, even when something heavy is pressing down. Civil engineers solve this same problem when they design floors, bridges, and stadium decks.

Hook: Build a table strong enough to hold a stack of textbooks, using nothing but paper and tape.

NASA LCROSS Mission — Moon Impact Footage

In 2009, NASA's LCROSS mission slammed a probe into the Moon to look for water. The probe was traveling fast and had to hit a precise target at the South Pole. To do that, engineers had to account for forward momentum: when you drop something from a moving object, it doesn't fall straight down, it curves.

Hook: Hit a bullseye from a moving spacecraft, exactly the way NASA did to find water on the Moon.

Solar Concentrating Mirrors — Super-Hot Focal Point

Solar energy is free, but you have to capture it well. Black surfaces absorb heat. Reflective surfaces (foil) bounce light onto the absorber. The longer water sits in the absorber, the warmer it gets. Today you will design a small solar heater and measure how much warmer you can make a stream of water.

Hook: To survive a Moon winter (or a power outage on Earth), people need hot water. Can you capture the sun's energy to provide it?

LifeStraw Filtered Dirty Water Under the Microscope

Engineers design filters that remove dirt, sand, and harmful chemicals so water is safe. Real filtration is always a trade-off: cleaner water often means slower flow. Today you will design a filter and prove your trade-off with data.

Hook: Two billion people don't have safe drinking water. The next clean-water solution might be the one you design today.

Paper Circuit Light-Up Card — DIY

Every electronic device, your phone, a smartwatch, a hospital monitor, runs on the same idea: electricity flows in a closed loop from a power source, through a part that does something useful (like a light), and back to the power source. If the loop is broken, nothing works. Today you build that loop yourself, on paper.

Hook: Make paper light up by drawing your own circuit on it.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy — Simultaneous Booster Landing

Every rocket, from a SpaceX Falcon 9 to your film canister today, works on the same principle: Newton's Third Law. Push gas DOWN hard, and the rocket flies UP just as hard. The more gas you push out, and the faster you push it, the higher it goes.

Hook: Build a rocket out of household stuff and launch it 10 feet in the air using nothing but a fizzing tablet.

AI Experiments: Teachable Machine

Artificial Intelligence isn't magic. AI learns from EXAMPLES. Show it 100 photos of recyclable bottles labeled 'recycle' and 100 photos of food wrappers labeled 'trash,' and it learns to tell the difference. The more examples you give, the smarter it gets. Today you become the trainer.

Hook: Train your own AI in 30 minutes that can spot real things in your classroom: trash vs. recycling, hand signs, masks, anything you choose.

Hack Club — Where Young Innovators Thrive

This is called VIBE CODING. You describe what you want in plain English. An AI (Google Gemini) writes the code. You copy that code into a file, then drag it onto Netlify Drop and the internet hosts it for free. No accounts, no installs, no signup.

Hook: Build a real, public website with your own URL in 60 minutes — without writing a single line of code from scratch. Anyone in the world can visit it by the end of class.

Learn to Vibe Code in 10 Minutes — Beginner Tutorial

Pass the Salt — Joseph's Machines

Real engineers love constraints. A pencil sharpener has one moving part: the blade. A paper guillotine has one pivot. A see-saw has one fulcrum. The fewer moving parts, the fewer ways something can break.

Hook: A single rubber band can do a lot of work — if you build everything else around it perfectly.

1959 vs 2009 Chevy Crash Test — IIHS Crumple Zones

Cars have crumple zones. They are SUPPOSED to crush, on purpose, to absorb crash energy and protect passengers. Buildings have weak floors that fail before columns. Bridges have fuses (sacrificial parts that fail first). This is called CONTROLLED COLLAPSE.

Hook: Real engineers don't just design things to NOT fail. They design HOW they fail.

How Breathing Works — Nirvair Kaur (TED-Ed)

Your lungs cannot suck. They have no muscles. The DIAPHRAGM is a sheet of muscle below your ribs that pulls DOWN. That makes the space inside your chest bigger. Bigger space at the same air = lower pressure. Air outside (higher pressure) flows in to balance the pressure. That's a breath in. When the diaphragm relaxes, the space gets smaller, pressure rises, and air flows out.

Hook: Build a working model of your own lungs from a plastic bottle and a couple of balloons.

Master Caution — Boeing 737 Cockpit Warning Light Explained

Every airplane cockpit, every nuclear power plant, every hospital monitor has WARNING LIGHTS. Engineers call them 'fail-safe indicators.' When the light is OFF, things are fine. When ON, something is wrong. The light has to be HONEST: it must turn on EVERY time the bad thing happens, and never falsely. People's lives depend on these lights telling the truth.

Hook: Build a circuit that turns on only when something is wrong.

How a Solar Water Pump Is Changing Lives in Uganda — AYuTe Africa Challenge

Around the world, hundreds of millions of people live without electricity. They need water, but pumping water from a well or moving it to a farm normally takes power. Engineers solved this problem with the SOLAR WATER PUMP: a panel converts sunlight into electricity, the electricity spins a tiny motor, and the motor pumps water — no battery, no grid, no cost after install.

Hook: Move water uphill using nothing but the sun. No batteries, no cords.

OK Go: This Too Shall Pass — Rube Goldberg Machine

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who drew comically over-engineered machines. Real engineers steal his idea: break a big problem into a chain of small actions. Each step does its part, then triggers the next. This is called SYSTEMS THINKING. If Challenge 15 was about ONE part doing one job perfectly, this is the opposite — MANY parts doing tiny jobs in sequence.

Hook: Build a 5-step machine to do a 1-step job. The most over-engineered solution wins.