Engineering Challenge: "Fetch, Dog, Fetch"

I told you I was working on a project to provide an engineering challenge in the classroom for grades 1-6. First, I was inspired by these two...

Linus (left) and Lucy (right)

Notice the balls in their mouths - they are now, and always, ready to play fetch.  Of course, they have no idea about the other things people need to do or why we should not be throwing the ball ALL THE TIME for them.

Then I saw this video on YouTube.  Boy was I inspired.  

It is, of course, too difficult to do in the average elementary classroom but could we do something more simple? Yes!

And even more simple...

All these ideas combined to inspire me to create an easily differentiated classroom engineering challenge that supports our Next Generation Science Standards.  In it, students complete either the basic or advanced challenge.  In the basic challenge, students create a tool that will help to throw a ball farther for a dog (and possibly create fun and fatigue for the dog).  In the advanced challenge, students create a machine that enables the dog to play fetch by himself.  

This unit contains a background story for the challenge (with real photos of Linus and Lucy), pictures of tools or machines that might inspire some creativity in your students, detailed teacher instructions, a parent letter, and journal pages for an interactive notebook.  It is available now in my TPT Store.  I hope you check it out.  Don't forget to follow my store as I post more elementary science and engineering activities to support the NGSS.