Introduction to the Engineering Design process through the creation of a catapult

The main objective of this lesson is to enable students to practice the engineering design process and recognize different actions as part of specific steps in the design process. Students will create a catapult to launch jelly beans as far as possible and their results will be presented to the rest of the class. The evaluation of their project will consist of the execution and application of the engineering design process, their catapult results, and a presentation where they must explain their design and compare it to the design of their classmates. By the end of the lesson students will have a better understanding of how the design process helps them create a product. In my fellowship we are doing research in Molecular Layer Deposition and we need to design our experiments in order to obtain answers to the questions we are researching and to obtain valid data that can justify our answer. The idea is that students at Stanford just like the students in my class have to be familiar with the design process in order to obtain satisfactory results.