Brownie Girl Scout Race Car Design Challenge for Mechanical Engineering

Is your Girl Scout Brownie troop looking to try something new? Did your Brownie Girl Scouts absolutely love the Mechanical Engineering Leap Bot Design Challenge or the Fling Flyer Design Challenge? If you haven’t done the leap bot challenge or fling flyer challenge yet, be sure to check out our guide to making Brownie Leap Bots and Brownie Fling Flyer Badge. Are you ready to try the Brownie Race Car Design Challenge? Well, we’ve got the best guide for you.

As we were planning out our Brownie Girl Scout year, our girls shows little interest in the Mechanical Engineering badges based on their name alone. During the summer and fall, our girls seemed to focus on outdoor or field trip badges. Once winter rolled around and we needed some activities to do at our meetings, we decided to try the mechanical engineering badges on a whim.

We started with Leap Bots since it seemed like an easier one for the girls to create but with lots of problem solving and thinking. Our girls loved it so much that we quickly made plans for the fling flyer badge next. Well, the troop wasn’t going to leave the race car design badge out either, so the planning quickly began with the girls taking even more lead.

What is a Brownie Race Car?

The Brownie Race Car is a handmade car made by the scouts. The challenge here is to build the car body to allow for speed depending on the track the scouts use. The race car did take our girls a little more planning and construction than both the fling flyer and the leap box. For the Brownie Race Car Design Challenge badge, our scouts needed two meeting days. One meeting was focused on planning, constructing and testing. The second meeting finalized construction, ran the challenge, and made any adjustments.

You can use a Goldieblox Making Things Zoom Kit, use pinewood derby race car kits, or create your race cars with just a few simple materials. The Making Things Zoom kit has all the pieces you will need to make a race car. However, we had some difficulty obtaining enough kits for all our girls and even purchasing them was way too expensive. Using the alternative Girl Scout race car design, we found we could explore the mechanical engineering badges much cheaper.

The alternative materials allow for many different ways to experiment. You could purchase just one size fits all or try out a variety of sizes for the car and especially the wheels. This allows the scouts to really focus on the design of the race car and the principles of how force and friction affect speed. If you want to vary the materials, that’s okay too. Just know that the testing will allow for more factors to be tested.

Materials Needed for The Brownie Girl Scout Race Car Design Challenge

For troops who have access to the Glodieblox Kits, you will need the Glodieblox Making Things Zoom kit. Using this kit, your scouts can create and earn all three mechanical engineering challenges, including leap bots, fling flyer, and race car. However, you can also create your own kits pretty easily with just a few purchases. We found that a quick trip to the local hardware store or craft store worked well. Each scout or pair of scouts will need:

• 2 – 4 wooden dowel per group. We found the best luck with the 1/4in dowels, as we could use the same dowel rods for the leap bots and fling flyers. However, be sure your dowel size words with your wheels. Alternatively, you could use straws, BBQ skewers, unsharpened pencils, toothpicks, etc.
• 4 wooden wheels per group. These wheels are 1.5″ in diameter, but you could also go with a different size. We found a 0.75″ diameter wheels as well. You could also use soda or water bottle caps, CDS, or other round objects with 4 in similar sizes.
• Small or medium sized boxes to use as the car body or to cut up for cardboard. We actually let each group choose what they wanted to use and cut up the box as they saw fit.
• Paper of all types. We offered plain white paper, construction paper, and card stock. This allows your troop to investigate the different weights of the paper on their designs.
• Tape or clay. We preferred masking tape or painter’s tape. However, you could also use duct tape. We found that scotch and washi tape weren’t really strong enough for the mechanical engineering badges.
• Scissors for cutting the tape and paper to design their race car.

An alternative option is to pair this badge with an event similar to the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby. You would buy each scout a Pinewood Derby Car Kit. If you choose to do this, you may want to see how involved the parents can be as they would need to design and create a car out of wood. The families may need access to some specialty equipment for cutting the wood block into a racecar. But this would take all the guesswork out of ensuring the dowels and wheels fit together as well as securing the wheels to the dowel rods (axels).

Tips for Leaders when Purchasing Race Car Materials

For our race car design challenge Brownie badge, we really only needed to buy wooden wheels. We were able to purchase these at Hobby Lobby, but Walmart and other craft stores carry these as well. We reused the dowel rods that we had purchased for our Leap Bot Brownie badge. Dowel rods are the only material that might be a little trickier; if your local Walmart doesn’t carry them, try any craft store.

Alternatively, if you choose to try waterbottle caps, be sure to have a tool to drill a hole in the middle to attach the cap to the axel. Depending on the size of the hole you drill, you may need a different axel than the dowel rods. We found that toothpicks worked well with my husbands smallest drill bit, but there really is no limit here.

For the race cars, we kept our dowel rods all the same size, since we used the same ones for leap bots and fling flyer challenges. However, you could also offer a variety of sizes or even materials as the axels for the race cars. Then your scouts could test the different wheel sizes and axel sizes. If you choose to go with the Pinewood Derby Car Kits, this is simple as they come with a standard size.

We offered a variety of wheel sizes, but ensured that the center hole fit our dowel rods. However, you could also provide all the scouts the same size wheels for greater ease. As you offer a variety of sizes and types, keep in mind how much your scouts are testing in their trials. Just be sure to limit what you allow your scouts to test to only what the girls can handle.

We did offer a variety of different sizes of cardboard boxes and paper. Our girls could use white copy paper, construction paper in a variety of colors, and card stock in different colors. If you are offering a variety of materials above, you could control the paper by only offering one type.

What are the Brownie Race Car Design Challenge Badge Requirements?

We began our exploration of the Mechanical Engineering Race Car Brownie badge, with a variety of balls to explore friction. We grabbed a soccer ball, softball, baseball, basketball, tennis ball, bumpy ball, foam ball, and marble. Just search around your house or ask the girls to bring in a few. Then allow the scouts to try rolling the balls on the floor. We used both carpet and tile for these tests to explore friction.

Our Brownie Girl Scouts already knew that some balls would roll better than others. Additionally, they knew that the tile would be a better surface than the carpet. Our scouts even started to create ramps to take turns using to see if these assisted with the force and distance. It was interesting how they took this investigation into their own hands.

As the scouts play, you can walk around and point out what the different scouts are trying. Our girls loved to come see what other groups were doing. Moreover, this encouraged others to try out something new. Throughout the experimentation, ask the scouts what they are doing to make their ball go farther. Then ask them how they know. This will encourage your scouts to start thinking of how they will measure their results.

Talk Together about the Brownie Race Car Design Challenge for Girl Scouts

After the exploration, bring your scouts together to discuss what they learned. Be sure to leave all the materials at the tables for less distractions during your brownie mechanical engineering: race car discussion. We encouraged the girls to share what they discovered. We tried to add very few corrections on their ideas at this time, instead letting the girls share. Your scouts might even disagree, that’s okay. Let them know that you will do more testing and they can check to see which really occurs.

We found it helpful during this discussion to write down notes. We kept a list of the different ideas the scouts shared, even if we knew that it was incorrect. If the scouts disagreed, we recorded that as well. Before presenting the challenge, we asked the scouts what questions they had. Record these as well, but try not to answer them just yet. Instead, let the girls know that when they return to testing, they can try to figure out answers to these questions.

Girl Scout Brownies Race Car Design Challenge Vocabulary

We did introduce a few words throughout the conversation with the girls. As the girls discussed, we are able to work most of these words into the race car stem challenge conversation. Try to introduce them as naturally as possible. However, if the scouts do not mention these ideas, then you may need to introduce them or ask leading questions to arrive at the words.

What Questions Can We Ask While Exploring Race Cars?

Then we laid out the challenge: Design a race car that goes the fastest to a specific point (farthest, straightest, etc). Let your scouts pick their ending challenge. Before allowing them to go back to their experiments, we needed to determine a way to measure and record the results. We put the girls to the test and they created a recording sheet and the rules for measurement. They did way better than we could ever have done!

Making the Brownie Race Cars

We provided our scouts a photo of a race car (or pinewood derby car if you go this route), but told them to be as creative as they wanted with the supplies. Our Brownie Girl Scouts needed some time to experiment now that they knew the challenge. Our scouts started with the dowel rods and attached the wheels to both end. Most scouts tested their dowel rod and wheels to see how they moved, determining the length of the dowel rod they wanted and how far about they want the front and rear axels.

Our only rule here was that the scouts would use the ramp to propel their race cars, not the strength of their push.

Then it was time to create their race cars. Each scout (or group/partner) created the body of the car using the paper, cardboard, and tape. Our girls needed a LOT of tape. Some of them even wanted to cut the cardboard boxes to make different race car designs, which we did allow.

Next, they decorated their race cars using tape, markers, or anything else the brownies could find. They enjoyed adding some googly eyes too! Our girls got really into the decorating and needed a time limit to get them back to their experimentation. However, you could definitely add additional time to allow for extended decorating.

Finally, the race cars were ready for testing! Just place at the top of the ramp and let it go. So exciting and so much racing.

*If you decide to create pinewood derby race cars, definitely provide time to build the car outside of your meetings so that the scouts may work one of one with a parent or other adult. The scouts can decorate them at home and then come together for the testing.

Creating the Track for the Race Car Design Challenge Brownie Badge

You will want to create your track before the girls get too far into their race car design. Our Brownie Scouts were all about performing preliminary tests as they were designing and creating their race cars. They would send their car down the race track often as they were making their designs.

Our girls wanted to create a way to test multiple cars at the same time, which we think lead to a more fair experiment. However, you could also create one track and take turns. To keep things fair, our girls raced in each lane of the track so that differences in lane performance was taken into consideration.

We made a tall ramp on a pretty steep angle. We happened to have some left over wood to make the track, so this was fairly easy for our scouts. Long metal shelves can make a great test track too! We do suggest either a wider piece or something with an edge so the cars do not roll off the track and fall straight to the ground. However, you could ask the local girl scout service unit or council if they have a pinewood derby track you can borrow. If the Girl Scouts don’t have one, try working with the local cub scout packs to see if you can borrow a track.

Testing the Race Cars for the Brownie Design Challenge

Once the race cars were ready (or at least ready for now), we all gathered around our test track and took turns racing our cars. The Brownie Girl Scouts took turn measuring and recording the results of the race cars. Having girls racing, recording, and measuring helps to keep everyone engaged.

Try your best to give each scout or pair of scouts a specific job to perform for each race. These jobs can include measuring official, record keeper, observer, race team, photographer, videographer, regulation official, and retriever. If you have more girls, feel free to have multiple girls on each role or add more roles as you see fit. We love having an assistant for some of the jobs, which can be a great role for younger siblings too.

Our girls decided to video each race at the ending line. So our videographer sat near the ending line and kept the device pointed towards the finish line so that it was easy to see who crossed the line first. If you are measuring distance, you may wish to add painter’s tape lines every foot or so for ease of measuring. You might consider adding a different colored mark at the halfway point between each foot. This would help to break some “ties.”

Finishing the Brownie Race Car Design Challenge Meeting

After the race track experience, we brought our girls back together to discuss the results and shared what they learned. During this discussion, it is important to address any misconceptions that are still lingering. Try to encourage your other brownies to help explain these misconceptions. Review the girls original list of ideas and questions, see which ones remain true, which the girls are not able to correct, and which they can answer. Be sure to reinforce the vocabulary words during this discussion too. Using the questions from above to review the activity can help cement their learning too.

Throughout the discussion, take the time to ask if the scouts have more questions. When possible, provide an answer. If not, record the question to discuss at the next meeting. You could even ask each girl to take home a question and see if they can find an answer to share at the next meeting. If there are lots of questions, every girl could even have two questions to answer. It’s okay to pair girls up on the same question too. This will give even more information for sharing.

We encouraged our scouts to use models to demonstrate why something did or did not work. The girls could show the different car designs and test them. We even tried a more methodical experiment by using the same general design with different size wheels and closer or further axels. This helped the scouts to better explain why their ideas worked using evidence and not just their best guess.

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What a fantastic dive into mechanical engineering and the best part, the troop was excited to tackle the robots badges next! Our girls loved earning this brownie badge.

Please check out our other Brownie Girl Scout meeting ideas and posts. Plus we have planned out a Brownie family celebration and Brownie Girl Scout camping trip. Leave a comment below and let us know if you’ve tried these race cars before. What worked well for you? What would you have tried differently? Did your girls love these race cars as much as ours? Do you enjoy making race cars using common objects found around the house or do you prefer the pinewood derby kits. If you are looking for more Girl Scout content, join our growing Creating Butterflies families for more ways to simplify Girl Scouting and earn badges while getting the girls outdoors.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.