Knock Over the Wickets Quickly

The 2020 competition is over, but you can still try this challenge for fun! Can you build a device to quickly and repeatedly knock down a wicket? How many knockdowns can you make in three minutes?

Full details, including the building, testing, and scoring procedures, can be found in these formats:

• Instructions for Students
• Elementary School Lesson Plan
• Middle School Lesson Plan
• High School Lesson Plan

Congratulations to All Participants

More than 4,900 students from 8 countries participated in the 2020 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge to create a machine capable of repeatedly launching a ball to knock down a wicket. Over 1750 teams built their machines from simple materials (like cups, craft sticks, rubber bands, tape, and cardboard tube) and then competed to see how many times they could knock down a wicket in a three-minute window. We were impressed by the wide range of creative designs, perseverance, and excellent teamwork we saw from the participants. Figure 1 shows a small sample of the hundreds of fantastic knockdown machines students created.

All eligible team entries were placed into random prize drawings based on their geographic location. Congratulations to the ten winning teams listed in Table 1 whose names were drawn from the eligible pools! Each of these teams earned $1,000 USD from Fluor Corporation for their school or afterschool program.

Top Ten Scores Overall

The 2020 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge, sponsored by Fluor Corporation, was open to students in grades K-12. The top 10 scores, overall, for the 2020 Challenge are shown in Table 2. All scores were validated by Science Buddies staff based on submission photos and the Challenge rules. Regardless of score, all entries that met the geographic requirements were entered in the random drawings.

Top Scores by Age

Students entering the Science Buddies Engineering Challenge work in teams of up to four students. To recognize the hard work students did creating and testing their solutions and to give students a better sense of how their solutions and scores compare to other students of similar age, the tables and graphs below show the top scores and score distribution for submissions from ages 6-10, 11-14, and 15-18. (Note: The age used for each team is the average age of all members on the team.)

Students Embrace the Challenge

Students who entered the 2020 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge had the chance to explore, firsthand, what it means to be an engineer and to collaborate with others to solve a problem and improve a solution. Here are a few examples of what students (and their teachers) told us about their experience doing this year's Cricket Wicket Kockdown Challenge: