My kids are in love with OBSESSED with LEGOs, so I was excited to create a STEM challenge that would stretch their building skills. Voila! That’s how this famous landmark STEM challenge was born.

It’s a cult-favorite! And it’s perfect to use in STEM centers or makerspaces. Grab your set in our shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Prepping the STEM Challenge

Prepping the activity took just a few minutes. I printed the challenge cards on cardstock to give them extra durability and cut apart the pieces.

To help ensure that our set stayed together, I punched a hole in the upper left-hand corner of each card and bound them with a ring.

Since I wanted to sprinkle in a little geography into the activity, I printed the map and laminated it for easy reuse. Then, I marked the four landmarks I was going to have the kids focus on that day: the White House, Eiffel Tower, the Giza Pyramids and Kukulcan Pyramid.

(Using a vis-a-vis marker on the lamination made it easy to wipe the map clean when we built our next set of landmarks later.)

I printed one planning sheet for each child and we were ready to begin!

Building Famous Landmarks

For this first day, I wanted the kids to work through the complete process of planning and designing their structure before diving into the LEGOs, so I gave each of them a planning sheet.

Big Brother (age 6.5) completed the page on his own but I helped Middle Brother (age 5) by writing down the answers he dictated to me.

Once the boys had a solid plan in place, they started building their structures. Middle Brother built a replica of Kukulcan El Castilla.

While Big Brother worked on the Eiffel Tower.

The STEM challenge cards were as motivating as I’d hoped!

Grab Your Set

Ready to play?! Hop over and download your set in our shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers!