“What is a hard problem?”

I ask my 5th graders at the beginning of the spring semester what they think a hard problem is and various hands will go up. “You will fail a lot.” “Challenging” and “Something that takes time to solve,” are comments that my students freely share. From my perspective, the “teacher” in the room, a hard problem is one that I do not see the solution for clearly, a problem that will challenge my students to learn challenging skills in digital and analog tool use, geometry and scale, grit through a series of failures and collaboration. For the last two years, 5th graders have had the experience of working for an entire semester on one problem, defined by a few simple rules.  Last Spring, The class of 2016 built a RubeGoldBridge (RGB) that connected five different machines or structures into one large system that did work on a 75 gram steep ball.  This RGB was taken by last years 5th grade to Maker Faire, where their designs and team work earned them two awards!

One section of 5B’s RGB structure/system for Maker Faire 2013

This year’s 5th grade was challenged a step further. This years 5th grade is building a life size pinball machine with the design theme of a city in the year 3000!  Their problem consists of the following rules:

Level One: Pass/Fail Rules

  • Keep a 65 gram steel ball in motion for x number of seconds
  • using 2 or more forms of forces
  • bridging 3 or more forms of energy

Level Two: Pass with Honors

  • Demonstrate design elements that reflect an understanding of how humans will live in the year 3000. Must use a claim, evidence reasoning format to support the Science behind the ART
  • Build ONE complete system rather than smaller team units separately

To solve this problem we began in teams of 4 with a special team of electrical engineers (or the e-team) who had the most experience working with electronics in the first semester. Next we spent a week completing a circuit circus where students mentored and practiced building simple circuits, drawing circuit diagrams, using a multimeter and soldering. Next it was time to get busy building our real pinball machine.

 

As a special bonus, on March 3rd, pinball mechanic Christopher Kuntz of the Pacific Pinball Museum generously donated one working vintage pinball machine to the iLab for inspiration and research as well as non-functional machine for students to harvest parts from.  With a working set of flipper motors and tons of faith, we embarked on our spring hard problem.

To date, we have seven different teams formed in each class around passions to solve specific problems for the class game. We have teams of electrical engineers making the score boards using LED’s, Arduinos to process triggers, and systems of motors that will interact with the steel ball in the play field.  A team of structural engineers building the frame. An art history and research team researching the science behind the games artwork. Mechanical engineers working on the launcher mechanism and bumpers. Teams of students learning how to use CorelDraw for the laser cutter. There is also a sound engineering team using Makey Makey boards to include sound effects for the game.

Below you see how students are logging problems that are shared across their sections. The best comment I have heard yet from one member of the sound engineering team was, “They are looking in the log and stealing our ideas!” My response, “That’s wonderful! Congratulations on your working design.”

 

Binders teams use to keep their problem logs together