SCAMPER Design Lab: 5 Creative Design Challenges + Teacher Tools, Student Pages & Slides

SCAMPER Design Lab is a complete creative-thinking and design experience that moves students beyond brainstorming and into purposeful problem solving, prototyping, testing, iteration, and reflection.

Across five increasingly complex design challenges, learners use the SCAMPER framework to rethink ideas, work within constraints, build and test solutions, learn from failure, and make intentional improvements.

This is not simply a collection of STEM projects. It is a full design-thinking system built to help students become more flexible, reflective, and resilient thinkers.

Inside the Design Lab, you’ll find:

• 70 teacher and student pages
• 24 accompanying presentation slides
• a complete SCAMPER overview and teaching guide
• implementation options and suggested grade bands
• reusable brainstorming and SCAMPER planning tools
• design planning pages
• testing and iteration pages
• peer feedback and gallery walk tools
• student self-assessment and reflection
• teacher rubric and feedback pages
• failure analysis and metacognition activities
• extension challenges and added constraints
• certificates
• five complete hands-on design challenges

The 5 Design Lab Challenges:

Creature Upgrade

-Students redesign an animal to solve a new survival challenge.

Object Remix

-Students transform an ordinary object into something with a completely different purpose.

Mission: Retrieval

-Students engineer a device to retrieve objects from beyond their reach.

Power It!

-Students use stored energy to create controlled motion toward a finish zone.

Protect the Payload

-Students design a protective delivery system while working within real material and budget constraints.

The challenges increase in complexity, but students do not have to stay inside a rigid grade-level box. The collection can be used flexibly across gifted education, enrichment, STEM, makerspace, design thinking, and creative problem-solving settings.

Students Move Through the Full Design Process

Investigate → Imagine → SCAMPER It → Plan → Create → Test → Iterate → Reflect

The goal is not simply to ask, “Did it work?”

Students are pushed to think about:

• what worked and why
• what failed and what it taught them
• what trade-offs they made
• what evidence should change their design
• what they would do differently in Version 2.0

Because the first idea is not the finish line.

Designed With Teachers in Mind

Use the SCAMPER Design Lab:

• as an introduction to SCAMPER and creative design
• to build creative-thinking routines
• in gifted pull-out
• in STEM/makerspace
• as a one-period design sprint
• across multiple class periods
• as a full engineering cycle

Print what you need. Project the rest. Make it yours.

Recommended For:

Gifted educators, enrichment teachers, classroom teachers, homeschool families, STEM teachers, makerspace facilitators, and anyone looking to move SCAMPER beyond simple brainstorming into deeper creative application.

The goal is to help students become thinkers who can:

• imagine possibilities
• work through uncertainty
• learn from failure
• make purposeful changes
• explain their decisions

That’s the Design Lab.

Glow Up Resource Library member? The complete SCAMPER Design Lab is already included in your membership.