Who doesn't like to play with good play dough?

First and second grade began a new engineering unit from the our curriculum, Engineering is Elementary. Our unit is called, "A Play Dough Process." In this series of lessons students learn about chemical engineers through a story called, "Michelle's MVP Award." The little girl in the story wants to create play dough to sell as a fundraiser and her whole hokey team is going to help make it. She works with her uncle Adam to develop a process for making play dough. Through this story the students learn about uncle Adam who is a chemical engineer and what his job as a chemical engineer is. They also learn about the engineering design process and that sometimes the process doesn't always work and we have to go back and improve our process. At the end of this unit students will use what they know about solids and liquids to develop their own play dough process.

We experimented with high quality play dough today to see what good play dough feels like. Students enjoyed rolling it, building figures, and  cutting out shapes. We discussed the properties of what good play dough texture is and what we expect out of the play dough we create. We also created  a testing rubrics with scores 3, 2, 1. Students will use this rubric to test their play dough texture when they make it. We also decided we need to test our play dough in one more way. Students wanted to make sure they could use their play dough with a cookie cutter so, we created another rubric called the usage test. In this test students will score their play dough with at 3, 2, 1 depending on how well their play dough cut out a shape.

3 = high quality play dough
2= okay quality play dough
1 = low quality play dough

Students are very eager to begin their own journey as chemical engineers and to improve our own play dough process. This should be an exciting experiment for them!