Give Me a Beak!

The recently adopted Next Generation Science Standards include both content and engineering standards. In order to encourage engineering thinking and design skills, a current adaptation lab was reworked to add an engineering component. Give Me a Beak! will allow students to design and test an appropriate bird beak for four specific environments. Students will collaborate with other team members to create beaks following a criteria of measurement constraints. They will then test each beak in specific environments and collect data to determine the best beak for each environment. Finally, students will create an illustration of each beak and attach their completed beaks on a “gallery wall” so other groups can see how each group tackled the problem. Students will be mirroring work done by my lab and mechanical engineering students at Stanford University where engineering students must design, construct, test their own research apparatus, collaborate, and re-design their prototypes.