The Three Little Pigs

By Megan Hancock

Pretend you are a high school student.  Would you rather sit through class and listen to your teacher lecture about structure and forces and take notes? Or would you rather play with marshmallows, toothpicks, and pennies to create your own structures and test different forces? At Dallas Independent School District’s (DISD) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Day, students spent the entire day working hands on with STEM.  I created a STEM lesson for high school students using marshmallows, toothpicks, pennies, and paper plates which was a modified version of a hands on engineering lesson.

 

The big bad wolf was after the three little pigs again, but this time he was going to destroy the pigs’ houses by applying different types of force.  In order to ensure their new houses would stand up to the big bad wolf, the pigs hired my students to be their engineers. Using marshmallows and toothpicks, they built houses that would be suitable for each of the three little pigs.  While constructing their houses, the students thought about different types of forces such as dead load, live load, and stress.  They also used their knowledge of geometry and three dimensional shapes to determine whether cubes or triangular prisms were better to build their houses.  

  

This activity allowed students to learn about geometry and engineering while being creative.  They were able to test different types of forces by placing a paper plate filled with pennies on the top of their house to demonstrate a live load.  Instead of having a teacher tell them how to build their houses, they were able to test different hypotheses and learn by trial and error.  At the beginning of the activity, my students were not sure whether cubes or triangular prisms would hold up better against the force of the pennies.  By the end of the activity, students agreed that triangular prisms were best because of the support beams provided by the triangle.  When pushing forces bear down on the side beams, the pulling force of the bottom beam balanced the structure. One student built a house that withstood the force of over 300 pennies!

        

The students went above and beyond my expectations of basic structures with a marshmallow at each end of a toothpick.  I had students cover all of their toothpicks with marshmallows, some who decided to construct a figure with a large surface area to support the weight of more pennies, and others who used multiple toothpicks for each side to provide more support.  The students demonstrated a great deal of knowledge about engineering and the necessary supports to withstand the force applied by the big bad wolf.  

    

It is amazing how much students can learn through hands on activities.  Instead of listening to a teacher tell the students that triangular prisms would be the best choice for their houses, they were able to build different structures and learn this for themselves.  My goal for this activity was to peak students’ interest in STEM.  As teachers, we are trying to prepare our students for jobs in STEM fields that have not been created yet.  Stohlmann, Moore, and Roehrig (2012) believed that “integrated STEM education can motivate students to careers in STEM fields and may improve their interest and performance in mathematics and science” (p. 32).  Hands on activities such as this one provide students with a glimpse of how they could use STEM outside the classroom.  Not all STEM activities are appropriate for the classroom, but there are many interactive websites that would be useful in the classroom.  For this specific activity, Living Children Multimedia created an interactive site that allows children to construct a 20 story skyscraper while taking budget, force, and three dimensional figures into consideration.  

In the future, I would love to have the students get more in depth with the geometry and engineering behind this task and build even larger structures.  I think it would be interesting to see how their strategies changed when they build a structure that was more than one story tall.  Overall, I think this activity went really well! It is important for teachers to begin integrating activities such as this one to spark their students’ interest in STEM and prepare them for their future careers.  

Stohlmann, M., Moore, T. J., & Roehrig, G. H. (2012).  Considerations for teaching integrated STEM education.  Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER), 2(1), 28 – 34.  Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jpeer/vol2/iss1/4/