K'NEX and Agriculture: A Design Challenge

We are a small rural school district in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and every year our Intermediate Unit (IU13) invites their schools to participate in a K’NEX Design Challenge. This year’s design challenge was to help farmers with a new way of farming or to design a robot that will help them on a farm. Our team of four engineers were from 4th and 5th grade and they had to go through the Engineering Design Process. They had to share their experience to judges by creating a solution to the problem or challenge, design a prototype, create that prototype out of K’NEX pieces and communicate any challenges they faced during this process. Our team collaborated with each other using only Apple apps to accomplish our tasks.

Three different criteria were needed for this project: a Design Notebook, a Blueprint of their prototype and a Short Presentation of their work through the design process, highlighting their solution to the challenge.

The Design Notebook was created in Keynote and was a journal of their story through this process together as a team.

Design Notebook in Keynote:

Journal Screen Shot

Journal Screenshot

The Blueprint was also created in Keynote and was modeled off of LEGO kits that many of our students were familiar with. This helped our team recreate their prototype during the competition.

Blueprint in Keynote:

Blueprint Screen Shot

Blueprint Screen Shot

Blueprint Screen Shot

The Presentation made in Clips and was only allowed to be two and half minutes long. Clips was an excellent tool for this part of the project. This is a shortened version of what our video consisted of, showing you the different sections we added to our presentation.

 Presentation in Clips: