About this resource
Some of the biggest challenges we face stem from how we interact with our environment, and engineering is at the heart of finding sustainable solutions. Working with water is particularly important when thinking about the environment because water sustains all life and is essential to the survival of the planet.
Activities and challenges range from creating bioplastics, designing flood defence mechanisms, investigating what microbes are getting into our water systems and generating energy from water.
The challenges in this STEM resource invite learners to explore some of these important and pressing problems that society faces, encouraging them to act and think like engineers to find their own solutions to a sustainable innovation design challenge.
This resource is designed to provide practical and contextualised applications where students and teachers can see the role that STEM-based learning plays in real-world engineering scenarios.
Each of the activities and challenges have links across science, maths and design technology. However, some activities will be more heavily weighted towards one subject.
Don’t worry! Experience or subject knowledge about engineering and STEM subjects is not required. The resource has been designed to allow students to learn independently and at their own pace, with your support as a facilitator, not a subject expert.
What do I need for the activities in this resource?
We want to make the resource as inclusive and accessible as possible. Although we provide some physical hands-on materials, most of the challenges can be adapted to use items that are easy to find around the house or in most classrooms.
The booklets are available for free for anyone to download. And any school who is part of our Connecting STEM Teachers programme will receive hard-copies of the resource as well as a class-set of DataHives. All for free!
Take part in our innovation challenge
The ‘Sustainable Futures Innovation Challenge’ invites students aged between 9 to 15 to come up with creative solutions to tackle some of the biggest problems that are creating carbon emissions and impacting our environment.