Design Must-Haves

6.A.1 Undertake a design project to construct and test a solution that meets specific design criteria and constraints, including the transfer of energy.

If a team’s design does not include characteristics related to the criteria and constraints (such as cost or type of materials used), remind the team to go back and add those. If a team is struggling to calculate the amount of reactants they want to use, suggest that they base their plans on prior test results, such as those from Lesson 4 (that 6 grams of total reactants in the most efficient proportion was able to heat up significantly) and consider if they might double or triple that amount (knowing that they will need more energy to heat more food). If a team’s design does not include the energy transfer at the particle level, it may be helpful to refer to the initial consensus model you made as a class in Lesson 1 that shows how the MRE heater’s particles were moving and ask the team to consider how that might be similar to their design. If these students experienced the previous unit, OpenSciEd Unit 6.2: How can containers keep stuff from warming up or cooling down? (Cup Design Unit), referring to Modeling What Is Happening at the Cup Wall can help remind students about the models they drew of their cups showing the energy transfer at a particle level.

An example design is shown here, but please note that there will be many potential successful designs; there is not one correct solution to this task.