Brain Safety STEM Challenge: Design a Football Helmet

lesson overview

Brain Safety STEM Activity: Design a safer football helmet!
Includes editable printed and digital STEM student journals and videos to support remote learning.

It’s football season. But wait, more and more players are getting concussions and hurting their brains! What keeps a football player’s brain safe? Your mission is to design and build a football helmet that protects a player's skull from cracking!

This hands-on activity is an engaging design challenge that allows students to work in teams (or individually), apply the engineering design process, and connect math and science topics to real-world applications.

Engineering Challenge: Students will learn about protecting our brains and then design and the evolution of the football helmet. Students are then tasked to use the engineering design process to design, build, and test a helmet to protect an egg (mimicking the brain) from a 1 foot drop. 

Real-world STEM Connection:

• Mechanical engineering

• Neuroscience

• Evolution of football helmets

• Challenges of protecting the brain

As with many STEM activities, this challenge can be tailored to students of various skill levels and abilities.

Included in this product:

• Detailed teachers guide with links to resources

• Editable Teacher Slides and Student Handouts

• Photos of student examples

• Student handouts to guide them through the design process

• Videos to motivate and support learning

• Editable Google Slides STEM journal for remote learning

• STEM Career Connection on Mechanical Engineer & Neuroscientist

• Science handouts on shock absorption and brain anatomy

• STEM Real-World Connection on the evolution of the football helmet

• Student recording sheet for each step of the process

• Math connection problems including surface area

Suggested Materials:

• cardboard

• eggs and egg cartons

• pipe cleaners

• rubber bands

• straws

• yarn

• string

• tape

• newspaper

• bubble wrap

• cotton balls

• sponges

• straws

• marshmallows

****************************************

Looking for more STEM lessons? Find the Vivify resource guide here: bit.ly/VivifyResourceGuide

Need to pay with invoice? Contact us here.