Students in grades 6–8 and 7–12 recently took on a hands-on engineering challenge in the Explore Zone: designing and building foil boats to see how many pennies they could hold before sinking.

Students first created blueprints for their boats, then used those plans to build and test their designs. As they added pennies, they were able to see how choices in shape, structure, and design affected how much weight each boat could support.

It was a fun way to combine creativity, problem-solving, planning, and experimentation — with plenty of opportunities to learn from each test and make connections between an idea on paper and how it works in the real world.