Overall General Impressions: This a great activity to build perseverance and to understand the design process of building, testing, and making adjustments. I did not have the hard, round candies, so I used magnets that were close in shape, but of course, much heavier. This made it difficult for the rubber band mechanism to function. I either had to add more torque or go out and purchase the candies. Also, I need to realign the square tires because they were not vertically true, which caused problems with the forward momentum and spinning as well. NGSS Alignment: JPL recommends this activity for 6th through 12th grades. It does align with 6th, 7th, and 8th grades engineering performance expectations. For 9th-12th, their engineering and design performance task needs to be applied to a real-world problem, so the rover would have to have a purpose for those grade levels. https://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/ngssstandards.asp. At Home Learning: This would be a fun activity for grades 6th-12th and would keep students occupied. The student needs to know ahead of time that the purpose of this activity is about not giving up and to continue to improve on their design. I think the candies and the plastic straws would be the hardest supply to find, since most people have cardboard, tape, pencils and rubber bands at home. I recently did a plastic straw activity with my students, and several did not have plastic straws at home because people are reducing them to decrease plastic pollution in our oceans.
