design planetary landing shuttle stem challenge astronomy 4th

Design a planetary landing shuttle

Jan 12, 2016

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The first project of our space exploration unit was designing a planetary landing shuttle. This could easily be adapted to a homeschool science study on the moon race (and probably will be in our homeschool next year).

design and test a moon lander for your space program

Planetary Landing Shuttle supplies

I spent a few weeks squirreling away any and all recyclables for this project. I stuck in some craft sticks, pipe cleaners, and some fabric, and then let them have at it. Imagine a picture full of recycling stuff, but the computer ate it.

Requirements for designing a planetary landing shuttle

As for most projects I gave the kids a rubric (~~which I’m still hunting for the exact copy of it~~, I made a new copy which is on my subscriber page, join my newsletter). Their planetary landing shuttle had to have in it:

space for two figures to sit (they were allowed to choose the figures)
room for cargo (the astronauts brought back a few tons of moon rocks)
a way to fly (wings or some kind of engine)
be able to survive a drop from 20 feet without any pieces falling off
a name for their planetary landing shuttle
a logo as well….. and more in the rubric

Then I set them loose designing for the next hour or so. Occasionally one of them would run upstairs and drop their shuttle off the balcony to see how it did. There was lots of excited mutters and explanations as they went through it all.

Testing our planetary landing shuttles

Finally we were ready to test these things. First came the obligatory posing and taking pictures because after all “Pictures or it never happened”. Then I had each of the kids explain their projects to me (watching this video let me reconstruct the rubric).

Then I stood below and took pictures as the kids took turns dropping their landing shuttles. Everyone’s shuttles did great, and we were able to have a great discussion of what made different factors work better than others.

design a moon lander for your space program

Come back tomorrow to see how we retrieve the planetary landing shuttles

Check out the rest of the series:

Space Exploration Unit

Comments

9 responses to “Design a planetary landing shuttle”

claire

January 12, 2016

I love this Ticia! It’s a bit like mini project based learning and has heaps of scientific enquiring and engineering. Brilliant!

Reply
1. Ticia
  
  January 12, 2016
  
  Thanks! It was so much fun to come up with. The kids had a blast trying to figure out everything.
Natalie PlanetSmartyPants

January 12, 2016

This is really very cool! I know Smarty would have thoroughly enjoy something of this. We have a bit of the problem testing landing though – last time we had to go to the playground and test our egg protection throwing eggs from the playground structure 🙂

Reply
1. Ticia
  
  January 12, 2016
  
  I can just imagine the strange looks you got for that.
maryanne @ mama smiles

January 13, 2016

Looks like your kids loved this!

Reply
1. Ticia
  
  January 13, 2016
  
  They really did, especially since one of the big rules in our house is “no dropping things from the upstairs,” and they got to break it.
Merri

September 26, 2016

Hi, this looks like a great project. What resources did you use to teach them the about a planetary landing shuttle, or is that in a different post?

Reply
1. Ticia
  
  September 26, 2016
  
  We had been to NASA down in Houston earlier that year, so they had seen examples of the landing shuttles already, but I’ve added a link to the books I checked out from the library into the post (that should have been there already, but apparently I forgot, the link is now at the bottom of the post or here).
2. Merri
  
  September 27, 2016
  
  Thanks! I see those books now. 🙂