Leprechaun Trap Design Challenge

The note from school says the leprechaun traps are due the week of St. Patrick's Day, and last year's came home from the bus in pieces. This year your second-grader wants a trap that springs, keeps the gold and gets to school whole.

A second-grader, a recycling bin and a leprechaun who wants the gold: this is an 18-page engineering design kit for designing, building and testing a leprechaun trap, and getting it to school in one piece.

What is inside:
- The six steps of the engineering design process (ask, imagine, plan, create, experiment, improve), in words a seven-year-old can read with a grown-up, with the process named and cited to NASA.
- A materials page for the recycling bin and the kitchen drawer, and a planning sheet with the leprechaun's rules and a sketch grid.
- Five traps, each on its own page with a drawing of how it waits and how it springs, a parts key, numbered build steps, a reason it should work and a "try it" fix: ramp and pit, plank see-saw, lure box, gold slide and log roll. A page to invent your own trap.
- A page on getting it to school in one piece: a base, a lid, tape points and how to lock the moving parts for the trip.
- A test log with a bus test, and a make-it-better page for three rounds of changes.
- Four notes from the leprechaun to leave by the trap, and a page of tiny footprints and a hat to cut out.
- A page for the grown-up (three evenings, who does what) and a share-day page for the classroom.

Ready for St. Patrick's Day, March 17. US Letter, prints on A4.

This printable was created with the help of AI tools, then checked fact by fact.

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