Implementing a PBL Design Challenge in Your School

For the past five years, Hudson Lab School (HLS), a K–8 progressive school committed to project‑based learning (PBL), has kicked off each school year with an exciting tradition: Design Challenge Week. In five days, students take on a real‑world problem, explore each phase of the design process, and present what they created and learned to an authentic audience. Design Challenge Week introduces concepts that students will revisit all year and offers a model for how any educational setting could experiment with PBL on a smaller scale. Even short, well‑designed challenges can lead to deeply engaged learning experiences.

Why Implement a WeekLong PBL Challenge?

The literature often recognizes the potential of PBL to motivate and engage students and teachers, build knowledge to meet content standards, and foster essential skills for future success. Despite this, our discussions with educators and observations in the field suggest that PBL remains the exception, not the norm. Teachers often feel that their schedules and curricula are too packed to make room for project‑based work, or they lack the confidence to try PBL due to limited training or experience.

A weeklong design challenge offers a low‑stakes entry point for educators who are curious about PBL but hesitant to commit to a longer project. Within a contained time frame, teachers can experiment with core elements of PBL (student voice and choice, inquiry, collaboration, iteration, and public sharing) while building a foundational understanding of the pedagogy. Drawing from experiences at HLS, we’ll share six tips we’ve learned to help educators thoughtfully dip a toe into PBL without feeling pressured to jump in all at once.

Tip 1: Find Space in Your Schedule

The good news is that there’s no required amount of time needed to engage in a Design Challenge Week. Teachers at HLS devote one to two hours daily to challenge activities and often increase that time as the week progresses. You only need to carve out small pockets of time over five days to try this approach.

As students engage in rich, meaningful learning, teachers may choose to devote a particular class period or subject area to the challenge. The key is to have a clear plan, communicate changes to students, and maintain consistency throughout the week.

Tip 2: Choose a Meaningful Challenge With Clear Parameters

Selecting the right challenge is essential. Teachers and school leaders can collaborate to identify a driving question that’s connected to a real problem in the classroom, school, or community that can be addressed meaningfully within a short period.

For example, in one Design Challenge Week, HLS students focused on improving their outdoor play space. They researched, brainstormed, prototyped, and built new elements for the playground. Each grade band approached the activity in ways that were developmentally challenging:

• Grades K and 1 made games out of stones, such as tic-tac-toe.
• Grades 2 and 3 made tools for a mud kitchen.
• Grades 4 and 5 made seats out of tires and rope.
• The middle school students made stilts and shelters.

Because their creations were added directly to the space, the students were able to see and evaluate the real-world impact of their work.

Consider the following guiding questions for your school:

• How might we redesign our playground (or part of it)?
• How could we make our hallways more student‑friendly?
• How can we make indoor recess amazing?
• How can we take care of wildlife near our school?

Projects with a building element anchor abstract ideas in hands-on experience and promote iterative problem‑solving. Creating something tangible offers an accessible way to teach the phases of the design process: understand, ideate, prototype, test, and refine. Simple machines work particularly well across age levels (pulley systems, levers, catapults, inclined planes, etc.).

Tip 3: Keep Materials and Resources Simple and Sustainable

When working on the project, children should be able to freely access research resources (books, videos, articles, “experts”) and design materials (tools, adhesives, cardboard, fabric, markers, paint).

With only five days for the project, it’s important to gather and stage the necessary items a couple of weeks before the start date. Collect them from school storage, family donations, libraries, or other local community organizations. It’s important to note that successful challenges do not require a big budget. In fact, limited materials can deepen creativity by prompting students in resourceful thinking.

Tip 4: Introduce the Project in a Creative and Exciting Way

A strong, engaging launch can shift learners from passive participants to active, enthusiastic problem‑solvers. To get students motivated, make sure that project invitations reflect a sense of urgency. One memorable Design Challenge Week began with a video that featured two “news anchors” describing a problem that needed students’ immediate attention. Their beloved mascot “ran away,” got stuck somewhere, and needed to be rescued. Each class was assigned one piece of the terrain, with the more challenging terrains assigned to the older groups. By the end of the video, the students were excited for this challenge.

The classes designed machines to transport the mascot (symbolized by a ping-pong ball) safely across different terrains back to the school:

• Grades K and 1 built a boat to get the mascot across a lake.
• Grades 2 and 3 used a pulley system to get the mascot off a cliff.
• Grades 4 and 5 built a catapult to get the mascot around/over a forest fire.
• The middle school students built a grabber tool to get the mascot out of a canyon.

Think carefully about introducing challenges in a way that reflects students’ interests, backgrounds, and experiences (stories, performances, guest visitors, mysterious packages, multimedia prompts, etc.).

Tip 5: Have a Public Exhibition—Big or Small

A weeklong challenge deserves a celebratory finale. Whether through a mini‑expo for families, a gallery walk for other classes, presentations to community partners or school leaders, or a video showcase, an exhibition offers students an authentic opportunity to share their work. Public sharing helps students articulate their process, highlight what they’ve learned, and take pride in their accomplishments. This reinforces that their ideas matter and aligns with typical PBL practices.

Tip 6: Close With Reflection

Although the exhibition may feel like the final step, it’s important to build in time for reflection. Taking a class period (45–50 minutes) to think about the learning experience helps students consolidate what they learned, increases memory and recall, and strengthens self‑confidence and motivation. The youngest learners might draw and write some sentences about how they thought the challenge went. Older students can use a rubric to guide them through the reflection process.

Teachers and school leaders can also reflect on their experience. Consider what worked well, what was challenging, and what could be improved to help refine future projects and build capacity for deeper PBL work in the future.

When the essential components of PBL are concentrated into a short, structured experience, educators gain confidence experimenting with new practices, and students experience the joy and motivation that come from tackling authentic problems. Schools can create space for this type of experience to signal that learning is an active, collaborative process.