Failure Leads to Learning with Ely Chapman

Students from the Ely Chapman Education Foundation teamed up with the Building Bridges to Careers’ Makerspace for a week of COVID-conscious STEM activities, including 3D printing and design, desktop catapults, and some important lessons regarding the scientific method.

Students started the week assembling and testing wooden desktop catapults. The catapults consisted of interchangeable parts which allowed students to test different configurations to see which maximized the shooting distance of a foam ball.

It was during this configuration process that one student noticed the catapults weren’t perfect. The foam ball had a tendency to fall off prior to launch. She announced, and her peers agreed, that the catapult would be better if it had a small “bucket” to hold the ball in place.

Though Makerspace had other activities planned, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity for an impromptu engineering challenge. So, as a group, we began collaborating around a computer with 3D design software. We took measurements of the foam ball and the catapult and soon we had designed what looked like a hollowed out half-sphere to hold the projectile.  We fired up the 3D printer!

The next morning, we discovered that our print had successfully printed! The foam ball fit just right. The part attached easily to the catapult. We put everything together, pulled back the lever, and it launched…straight at the floor.

Often, in an educational setting, students conduct “experiments” in which the results seem pre-determined. Equally if not more important are activities which allow students to try ideas out for themselves, possibly fail, analyze the data, then try again.

So that’s exactly what we did. Everyone overcame the initial disappointment and we tried again, failed, thought about why we failed, and tried again…and again. At the end of the week, even though the final product launched about the same distance as before, the lessons  learned were invaluable.