We love our easy STEM activities, so I wanted to see if we could make an apple activity that incorporated STEM skills.
Thus, the apple engineering challenge was born and it was a fun addition to our Thanksgiving STEM activities.
When I was planning for our apple activities for kids series, I had a hard time coming up with original ideas.
There are tons of amazing apple activity ideas online as well as engineering activities for kids, but I wanted something that was somewhat new but still easy to do.
Apple Engineering Challenge: Stack the Apples
I love this apple stacking game because it took zero prep and it held the attention of my kids for almost an hour!
It was fun and the girls were able to come up with a surprising number of apple stacking creations using just apples.
Supplies for the Apple Engineering Challenge
You don’t really need anything else for this apple engineering challenge other than apples! You could use fake apples if you didn’t want to bruise real apples.
Another option is to include toothpicks to help hold the apples together as the students learn how to stack apples.
How to Make Your Own Stacking Apple Engineering Challenge
For this apple stacking game, I challenged my students to see if they could get the apples to stack.
Before we started, I wasn’t sure if the balance of the apples would work out so that more than two or three apples could sit on top of each other.
But as the students experimented, they found out that in order to get the apples to stack, they had to align them in a specific order.
The bumps on some apples fit into the dips on others, which is how the kids were able to make up to six apples together in a stack!
How to Stack Apples
After making stacks of single apples, try building a larger structure with a base of four or more apples.
This will be harder to do than the single stack, because the roundness of the apples will push the base apples apart from one another.
Eventually, students will be able to construct somewhat elaborate structures and make things like apple towers, apple houses, and apple walls!
The apples will get bruised during this activity, but you can take them home and make them into baked apples or allow the students to wash the apples and eat them for snack after the activity is completed.
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