Middle School Students Engineer Fun

The challenge: create a child’s pull toy that incorporates movement. The timeline: 10 weeks.

Eighth-grade students in Jeff Naso’s engineering design class put their Carmel critical-thinking and creativity skills to work in teams, designing a toy for their client, just as a real-life engineering team would.

Students worked through a six-step design process to tackle the project: define the problem, generate a concept, design a solution, build and test, evaluate and present your solution.

To make their toys move, students had to learn about mechanisms, how they work and how to build them. From there, they chose two options to incorporate into their toy and began designing.

Creativity was flowing with design sketches of Pac Man, Ferris wheels, hot air balloons, Mario Brothers, planes, trains, boats and more.

“We are creating a chain drive that is going to end up powering a cam and follower (a rotary mechanism that causes a lever to move) to create a frog that will move up and down,” said student Aine Carey of her group’s design concept. Carey and her group members each took the lead on a different aspect of the project: mechanical, computer programming and appearance design – something Naso recommends to all the groups, as real-world engineering teams function in the same way.

One of the first things students need to learn is how to fail. In Naso’s classroom, failure takes on a different meaning: First Attempt in Learning. He stresses that the students learn from every mistake along the way.

“Be bold enough to just explore,” said Naso. “Every day it's about making progress and moving forward.”

Students Tri Sudjaritjuntorn and Kai McKenzie found that to be true with their project, which needed some modifications from their original design.

“We changed the Mario & Luigi figures so instead of one of them being on top and one underneath, we had them both on top,” said Sudjaritjuntorn. “We realized it they both went underneath they would get flattened.”

“We had to make some modifications for the bevel gear but other than that it's been following our design sketch,” said student Mariana DaSilva of her group’s design.

But for the students, it is not the end project that defines the course, but rather the real-life experience and lessons learned along the way.

“You might not finish this thing, but you need to keep track of your progress and document the problems you ran into along the way,” Naso said to the class. “That’s what engineers do.”

As students made strides on their design every day, the excitement of seeing their project come to life was real.

“Our original plan was using a chain drive into a gear train. Honestly, I did not think it was going to work,” said student Parker Capolino of her group’s Ferris wheel design. “We were thinking of hooking up a motor as well, and we still could do that, but our whole build could work right now just being pulled. It’s entirely mechanical!"

“I enjoyed making our original mechanisms and I thought it was cool that we could then put it all together,” said student Mikayla Simon of her group’s final prototype.

Despite a time crunch, the quarterly course ended with important life lessons learned and a plethora of creative and fun toy prototypes for all to see.