It is not necessary to follow the textbook when teaching science in the classroom. Allowing children to solve a scientific problem in their own way and seeing where their discoveries lead them is the best method to fully interest them in the sciences. The main problem in the classroom is that you don’t always have access to all of the materials, and it’s easy to become discouraged when you hear about the amazing things that individuals with larger school budgets are doing.

The good news is that, in many ways, a lack of expensive resources isn’t a limiting factor since, as long as you interest the children with a problem worth addressing, they’ll be just as pleased working with simple materials as they are with expensive things.

‘Water bomb or egg drop challenge’, ‘Wooden ice-cream stick bridges,’ ‘Marshmallow & Spaghetti towers,’ or ‘Build the highest cup tower’ are examples of low-budget challenges.

Beyond learning to work with materials on a design challenge, a major outcome is that kids can learn through failure. While it may seem nice for students to have constant success in their experiments, having consistent success while completing textbook experiments does not teach your students about coping with obstacles when not all of the variables are known.