Lesson plan
A-head of the Game
Students will design, build and test a protective football helmet to reduce the severity of impact in hopes of preventing concussions.
Grades 6–8Engineering
Overview
Students respond to a scenario in which a football player is concussed and a school district debates helmet policy. They read news articles on concussions, research their school or state concussion policy, and study what a concussion does to the brain and how forces, energy, and acceleration are involved. Groups of two or three then design, build, and test a protective football helmet, working from a 1:2 scale drawing and a controlled experiment on impact force. Each student concludes by writing a letter to the school board that presents the testing data and the biological and physical reasoning behind it.
Lesson Objectives
- Design, build and test a protective football helmet to reduce the severity of impact in hopes of preventing concussions.
Standards
NGSS · 7
- MS-PS2-1Apply Newton’s Third Law to design a solution to a problem involving the motion of two colliding objects.
- MS-PS3-1Construct and interpret graphical displays of data to describe the relationships of kinetic energy to the mass of an object and to the speed of an object.
- MS-LS1-8Gather and synthesize information that sensory receptors respond to stimuli by sending messages to the brain for immediate behavior or storage as memories.
- MS-ETS1-1Define the criteria and constraints of a design problem with sufficient precision to ensure a successful solution, taking into account relevant scientific principles and potential impacts on people and the natural environment that may limit possible solutions.
- MS-ETS1-2Evaluate competing design solutions using a systematic process to determine how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.
- MS-ETS1-3Analyze data from tests to determine similarities and differences among several design solutions to identify the best characteristics of each that can be combined into a new solution to better meet the criteria for success.
- MS-ETS1-4Develop a model to generate data for iterative testing and modification of a proposed object, tool, or process such that an optimal design can be achieved.