Straw Tower Challenge - MIDDLE SCHOOL - STEM Engineering

Design and build a free-standing structure that carries a 100 g load for at least thirty seconds using only fifty straws and a hundred paper clips

Sketch a blueprint before construction and use it to guide the build, rather than assembling by trial alone

Work through the full engineering design cycle named in the file — brainstorm, plan, build, test, refine — inside fixed time limits

Explain how balance, weight distribution and the shape of the structure determined the tower's height and stability

Relate the classroom build to real construction, describing the role of a skyscraper's foundation and the extra demands of building where earthquakes occur

Make the 100g weights before the lesson and keep them uniform; the Teacher's Guide offers coins, a small bag of sand or rice, clay or Play-Doh, standard laboratory weights, or a Lego build weighed on a kitchen scale

Have a ruler or measuring tape ready for the final evaluation — height is one of the three judged criteria and is measured only after the tower holds the weight for thirty seconds

The whole sequence is timed at roughly fifty to fifty-five minutes of student work, so the reflection discussion needs its own slot rather than the tail of the same period

Scissors are the only tool permitted and the rules put them in the teacher's hands, so plan how they are shared between groups

The Teacher's Guide suggests displaying the finished towers with each group's name and height for the school to see, which gives the measurement step a purpose beyond scoring

The extension questions reach well past the build into skyscraper engineering, so they suit an early-finisher task or a written follow-up rather than the same lesson

Engineering design process — students brainstorm, sketch a blueprint, build, test with the weight and then refine, with each stage given its own time allowance in the instructions.

Structural reasoning — the science briefing sets out why triangles and pyramids hold their shape while a rectangle deforms into a parallelogram, and students apply that when choosing a tower form.

Working within constraints — only fifty straws, a hundred paper clips and a pair of teacher-held scissors are allowed, so a design that needs anything else has to be rethought.

Team collaboration — the tips page asks groups to divide tasks by strength across building, planning and testing, and a reflection question asks students to judge how that division affected the result.

Measurement — a tower counts only once it has held the 100g weight for thirty seconds, after which its height is measured with a ruler or tape.

Learning from failure — the tips page and the reflection questions both treat a collapsed first attempt as information for the next design rather than a lost round.