Family Engineering: Rubberband Cars

Participants use the engineering design process to create rubberband-powered cars. Then, they learn about little-known Black inventors who helped make our roads and vehicles safer and are invited to imagine and create an invention to help improve car or road safety!

Full Program Description

Brainstorm, design, build, and test structures to solve problems and help make the world a better place – just like real engineers!

In this program, we’ll design, build, and test rubberband vehicles. You’ll also have a chance to learn about several Black engineers who created many inventions we depend on every day, from automatic transmissions to traffic lights.

Supplies

materials to build ramps for driving and testing the cars (we used our wooden hollow big blocks and our giant magnetic tiles, but you can use cardboard and stacks of books)
rubberbands
car setups (I used wide wood craft sticks, toothpicks, straws, skewers, and dowels to hot glue the basic rubberband car setup for participants before they arrived to make the process a just-right challenge instead of a frustrating experience, but you can let participants do the whole thing themselves. There are lots of ways to make rubberband cars. I chose what seemed to be the simplest to me).
wheels (recycled bottlecaps, cardboard circles, or purchased wheels)
hot glue
materials to decorate the cars, such as markers, decorative tape, stickers, gems, etc.

Assets

table signs with instructions | printable 8.5″ x 11″ pdf | copy & edit in Canva

auto-loop Powerpoint slide show | download | copy & edit images in Canva

Sally Battle

March 22, 2025

anti-bias activities, best for 4+, Black History Month, cost, minimal cost, moderate staff time, recycled materials, staff time, stem

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We recommend...

As always, we recommend pre-reading this book before reading it to your children or group.

In this story, Milo and his sister travel by subway train to visit someone special. Along the way, Milo imagines where other people on the train are headed.

Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Milo’s mother is incarcerated and that Milo and his sister are on their way to visiting her.

In our workshop, we chose to end the story before Milo’s destination was revealed. We were meeting over Zoom, which made conversations difficult, and we felt that we would not be able to give a conversation about incarceration the attention and time it deserved.

We emailed parents and caregivers to let them know why we did not choose to read the whole story and encouraged them to finish the book on their own. We also encourage parents and caregivers to watch the entire fascinating video from illustrator Christian Robinson.

Be sure to check out the Penguin Random House Teacher’s Guide (a free downloadable pdf) with ideas for talking about this topic with children plus tons of other great material.

As leader, you have a couple of options in introducing this project:

You can tell kids that they’ll be making a color-changing slime. Then they can make a more informed choice about the color of thermochromic pigment and food coloring that they choose. Click here to get a better idea of how to choose the colors of the pigment and food coloring to predict the color of the slime when warm and cool.
Or you can have them make the slime and play with it until they discover a change in color. If you want to go this route, make sure that you choose a thermochromic pigment that changes temperature at a lower temperature (70-80 degrees Fahrenheit); otherwise it may take a while for the slime to warm up and you may need to tell the kids regardless.
Or you can tell them that they’ll be making a slime that has a hidden power and ask them to figure out what it is.

Family Engineering: Rubberband Cars

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