Table-top Mini Golf: STEAM Engineering and Design for Elementary GATE

In From Putt-putt to Pebble Beach--Table-top Mini Golf, students will design and construct a playable table-top sized miniature golf course using the engineering design process. With these lessons, the teacher defines the problem, helps students gather background research, and specifies the requirements. The students do the rest: creating alternative solutions, choosing the best solution, doing development work, building a prototype, and testing and redesigning. The result is a classroom filled with a fun, scale-model miniature golf course ready to play for family and friends in an end-of-unit open house.

Mathematics and physics fill much of the background research lessons, and lessons in economics, advertising, and even a gifted and talented social-emotional lesson add depth and breadth to the unit.

From Putt-putt to Pebble Beach has been tried and tested with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade gifted and talented students. The unit will meet the needs of an upper elementary gifted and talented pull-out group meeting once or more per week over the course of a semester.

Teachers can count on a minimum of 20 hours of class time with these lessons—much, much more if suggested lesson extension opportunities are taken.

With these lessons, students will be urged to be thinkers, not repeaters; creators, not copiers; and artists instead of manufacturers. The lessons provide depth of knowledge for content standards and plenty of room to grow. Specific references to standards validate the critical thinking, engineering tasks, and targeted nonverbal ability methods. It’s a unit designed for 21st Century Learners—our best and our brightest in a modern world built for the nonverbally gifted student.