Project: Soccer World Cup

Introduction

In "Soccer World Cup", small teams use office supplies to make a device to score a soccer goal. The goal is just a box turned on its size (e.g., a box that reams of paper are shipped in, a shoe box) and the ball is a ping pong ball.

We invite you to use this project with a capture method from the Capturing Design Signatures collection. Using a capture method, this activity gives students the opportunity to reflect on the actions they take in their design process, and notice how they work together as a team.

Choose one of the following capture methods:

Why do this activity?

The purpose of this activity is to engage students in a low-stakes and creative design activity. Through tracking the design timeline of each team, this activity sets up a discussion about the importance of design process in producing a product that performs well and about how design is not a rote set of steps.  

After this activity, students will be more able to: 

Materials needed

Setting up the activity

  1. Set up the goal, goalies, and fault "plane" as shown in the diagram below
  2. (Optional: as the instructor, set up the capture method you've chosen)

Doing the activity

  1. Introduce the activity to students using the diagram above.
    1. "Design a device to score the soccer ball in the goal. The device must be fully behind the “fault” plane at all times and no member of the team may extend past the fault plane.  A member of your team may activate the device, but the energy to propel the soccer ball towards the goal must not come from a team member.  You will get to try to score 3 goals - the objective is to maximize the number of goals made."
  2. Students have 15 minutes to design and build a device. One person on each team will be the Design Process Tracker. This student will record the type of design activity that their team did during each minute. If the team did more than one activity in a minute, select the most dominant activity. The Design Process Tracker can help with designing the device, but we've generally found hat recording design activities requires most of their attention.
    1. Have students choose and identify the tracker for each team.
    2. Explain the design process categories you plan to use for this activity.
    3. Have the design process tracker access the capture method of your choice.
  3. Display a 15-minute timer, give each team a kit of materials, and begin the timer.
  4. Call out each minute to remind the Design Process Tracker to make a recording.

Student Responses and Takeaways

Student responses

An example design timeline from this activity for eight different teams, with a key on the right.  Note that Team 7 had the best-performing device. This prompted a discussion about how linear their process was, why that may have worked well for a 15 minute project, why other design processes may work better for longer projects, and generally about how tightly connected design process is to product performance.
Student takeaways

Coming soon!

Instructor Tips and Advice

Use Design Activities that make sense for your class and connect to how you talk about design in your class.

Showing the tracked design processes immediately after the activity is desirable so that they are still connected to the activity.  You can choose to discuss what they and you observe right then, ask them to write up what they observe, or even hold the discussion during the next class period.