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Classroom activity Grade 6 Art & Music

Booster Pump Kinetic Sculpture Design Sprint for Rill Valley

A grade 6 design-sprint activity where teams sketch and score two paper kinetic-sculpture concepts that show how a booster pump lifts water to higher ground.

Objectives

  1. Students will design a moving paper model that shows water being lifted.
  2. Students will score two design concepts against shared criteria.
  3. Students will choose one concept and justify the choice with the scores.

Vocabulary

Key words: kinetic sculpture, booster pump, mechanism, criteria, prototype

Teacher overview

Gravity alone cannot always move water to where people need it, so utilities use booster pumps to lift water up to higher neighborhoods and keep pressure steady. Rill Valley (a fictional town for this activity) sits on a hillside, and its art teacher has asked teams to design a kinetic sculpture, a piece of art that moves, showing the idea of water being lifted from a low tank to a high one. This is a design sprint for teams of three or four. The core skill is systematic evaluation: each team generates two concepts and then scores both against the same criteria before choosing one, which is how engineers and designers pick a solution instead of just going with a favorite. The paper model does not need to actually pump water; it needs to clearly show the lifting motion through a moving part.

Activity Directions

  1. Introduce the idea of a booster pump with a quick sketch on the board: a low tank, a pump in the middle, and a high tank, with water moving upward. Explain that the sculpture should show that upward motion with a moving part such as a spinning wheel, a crank, or a lever.
  2. Post the three scoring criteria and explain each: Lifting motion, meaning the moving part clearly shows water going up; Sturdiness, meaning the model holds together when moved; and Materials use, meaning the design uses only the supplied scraps.
  3. Give teams eight minutes to brainstorm and quickly sketch two different concepts on paper. Both concepts must include at least one moving part.
  4. Have each team build a rough paper prototype of the moving part for each concept, just enough to test whether the motion works. This is a fast prototype, not a finished sculpture.
  5. Teams score both concepts on the printed rubric, giving each a rating of 1 to 3 on the three criteria, then total the points.
  6. Each team chooses the higher-scoring concept and writes one sentence naming which criterion decided the choice.
  7. End the sprint when every team has a chosen concept, a completed score sheet, and a labeled sketch. Teams that finish early refine the moving part of their chosen design.
  8. Debrief with two questions: how does your moving part represent water being lifted, and which criterion was hardest to meet with the supplied materials?

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Differentiation

Support

Provide one pre-assembled example of a moving part, such as a brad-and-cardboard crank, so students can see a mechanism before designing their own. Offer a rubric with the rating scale already labeled (1 weak, 2 fair, 3 strong).

Extension

Ask a team to add a second moving part that shows the water arriving at the high tank, then re-score the improved concept and explain whether the new part changed which criterion is now the weakest.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "lift," "pump," "moving part," and "sturdy" with gestures and a quick demonstration. Allow teams to label their sketches with arrows and single words rather than full sentences, and pair students so speaking partners can talk through the design before scoring.