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STEM
Brownie Automotive Design Badge Activity
Design and sculpt your own vehicle
Explore the steps creative designers take to create a vehicle as you sketch.
Activity Details
Time needed: 60 minutes
Materials needed:
- Vehicle Design Guide
- Brownie Vehicle Diagram
- 2+ large sheets of paper
- 4 oz. (1/2 small pack) or more of white modeling foam (not foam beads), modeling clay, or dough
- Extra modeling foam, clay, or dough
- Tools for sculpting the foam/clay/dough, such as rolling pins, cookie cutters, dull plastic knives, hard materials with patterns, etc.
- A pair of safety scissors
- Scrap paper
- Markers
- A pencil
- Optional: Tracing paper
Setup:
A vehicle is a machine, like a car, truck, or motorcycle, that moves people or things from place to place. The kinds of vehicles people need are different depending on what the people do, where they live, and what they need to transport. Automotive design is imagining and creating new cars and other vehicles.
Creative designers are the people who create new vehicles. They choose everything from the color of the vehicle to the shape of the headlights. It’s a big job to design a vehicle, so there are many people on the design team who focus on designing different parts of the vehicle.
Activity:
For this activity, you’re going to design a brand-new vehicle that can help other people. You’ll brainstorm what your customer, the person who will be buying the vehicle, wants and needs before you sketch and sculpt a vehicle model.
Part 1: Meet your customer.
Market research is when designers use interviews, surveys, and product tests to learn what kind of vehicle their customers would like. For example, a designer might find out that people want a car that uses less gasoline or would love a purple truck. Whatever it is their customers want, designers want to know!
You have three options for your automotive design challenge. You can choose to design:
- A mobile clinic for a veterinarian
- A vehicle to transport a sports team and their equipment
- A mobile maker space for kids (where they work together on projects with tools, technology, and other equipment)
For the first part of the activity:
- Look at the information about each customer on page 2 of the Vehicle Design Guide and check the box for the customer of your choice.
- Pretend to be your customer. Ask yourself questions like: What do I need a vehicle for? Where am I going? Why am I going there? How many passengers will there be? What kinds of cargo do I need to bring with me? How fast do I need to get there? What do I like and dislike? For example, what’s my favorite color?
- Write any notes or sketch any ideas on a blank sheet of scrap paper.
- Ask yourself other questions that focus on how you can design a vehicle for your customer. For example, what would they need or want in the interior (inside) of the vehicle? What do they need or want on the exterior (outside) of the vehicle?
- Write any notes or sketch any ideas on a blank sheet of scrap paper.
Part 2: Create your design criteria checklist.
Now that you’ve brainstormed what your customer wants and needs, you’ve gathered a lot of data! Data is just another word for information. When you think about data and use it to make decisions, that’s called data analysis. This is something creative designers do: they find out what their customer wants and needs and use it to create the criteria for their vehicle.
Criteria are the things a product, such as a car, needs to have. All vehicles need some of the same parts—like an engine and wheels—to make them move. Automotive design teams also add other parts, or design features, that make the vehicle even more useful or fun, or different from other vehicles. For example, heated seats are great to have if you live in a cold place. Cupholders and places to charge cell phones are helpful for people on the move.
It takes an entire team of creative designers to create a vehicle. For example:
- The interior creative designer imagines what will go inside a new vehicle. They design parts like the seats, dashboard, and inside of the doors.
- The exterior creative designer adds criteria about the outside of a vehicle, like its body shape, doors, wheels, and windows.
- The color and trim designer chooses the colors inside and outside of the vehicle, decides on the fabric or material used for the seats, and creates any other decorations for the vehicle.
For the next part of the activity:
- Analyze your customer data from Part 1. Ask yourself questions like: What did you learn about your customer? What do they want or need? What could be useful for them as they move from place to place? What could make the ride more exciting?
- Look at the criteria checklist on page 3 of the Vehicle Design Guide. What required parts do you see for the vehicle interior? What required parts do you see for the vehicle exterior? What does each part do? If needed, check out the Brownie Vehicle Diagram to find out more about each vehicle part.
- Pretend you’re each type of creative designer described above (interior creative designer, exterior creative designer, and color and trim designer) and use your data to brainstorm special features for your vehicle.
- Add any special features for your vehicle to the checklist on page 3 of the Vehicle Design Guide. Then add colors, materials, and any other decorations to the last section on the page.
Want More of a Challenge? Try This!
Automotive designers make sure their cars are safe—that's important for drivers, designers, and everyone involved. For example, they might choose materials to strengthen the body, look for ways to make the seats and dashboard better at protecting people, or design windows that won’t shatter.
They also want their vehicles to be sustainable. Sustainable products are usually better for the environment. For example, automotive designers might think of ways to reduce pollution, make the vehicle go farther with less fuel, or use renewable materials in their design. Vehicles may be made in a way that creates less pollution by using cleaner forms of energy and more eco-friendly materials.
If you want more of a challenge, add criteria for parts or special features that make your vehicle safer or more environmentally friendly.
Or, add other criteria to your checklist. For example:
- Design the right vehicle for the terrain. Consider how your vehicle would operate in different environments. Add criteria that will make your vehicle good at moving in different places, like on rocks, through sand, or in a city with lots of traffic and little space.
- The future of mobility is changing fast! Add criteria to make a “vehicle of the future.” Would the vehicle still have four wheels? Would it be able to drive itself?
Part 3: Sketch your vehicle.
After creative designers have an idea for a new vehicle, they sketch many different pictures of it. They’ll draw the exterior of the vehicle and the interior. If there’s a special feature or part they want to showcase, they might sketch a picture of that, too. This helps creative designers to think about every part of their design.
Once designers have their ideas drawn on paper, they can share their sketches with their teammates. The team can work together to look over the sketches, ask questions, identify any problems, and exchange ideas to make the design even better.
For the next part of the activity, use your imagination and criteria in the Vehicle Design Guide to:
- Draw the vehicle exterior.
- Draw the vehicle interior.
If you need ideas, check out the tips for sketching on page 4 of the Vehicle Design Guide.
Part 4: Sculpt your vehicle.
What’s even better than a picture to help people understand your design? A model! Automotive design teams have many ways of creating models of their vehicles. Each model helps others to understand the design in a different way. For example, the model might be of the entire car, the interior, the exterior, or even a particular part or feature.
The team might create models digitally on a computer, with the help of technology like a 3D printer, or use a material like clay or wood. For example, a digital sculptor uses computer programs to model digital versions of their designs.
Next, you’re going to be a clay sculptor! That’s a person on the design team who sculpts models of the vehicle out of clay.
For the next part of the activity, pretend to be a clay sculptor and:
- Use your criteria and sketches to create a sculpted model of your vehicle.
- Once your foam, clay, or dough dries, add color and trim to your model vehicle with markers (if you can)!
If you need ideas, check out the tips for sculpting on page 6 of the Vehicle Design Guide.
And that’s it! When you imagine what the customer wants or needs, you're doing what a creative designer does. You used what you learned about your customer to create a list of the design criteria, including all the important parts and special features for your vehicle. Then you used your criteria to sketch and sculpt your vehicle.
If you had fun doing this, you might want to continue designing vehicles with the Brownie Automotive Engineering three-badge series.
Troop Leaders: The instructions for all badge steps are available free of charge in the Girl Scout Volunteer Toolkit.
Girl Scout Activity Zone activities have been adapted from existing Girl Scout programming.
Adapted from Steps 3, 4, and 5 of the Brownie Automotive Design badge. Contact your troop leader or your local Girl Scout council to become a Girl Scout member and learn all the requirements needed to earn the badge.
Made possible by a generous grant from General Motors.
Interested in creating the future of vehicles? Check out the videos below to find out what it's like to have a job in automotive design, engineering, and manufacturing.
Explore more activities.
