Design Like an Architect: Ozobot’s K–5 STEM Competition

What would your students design if they could create a new space for their community? Maybe a playground with room for everyone, a garden buzzing with bees, or something we haven’t imagined yet.

We’d love to find out!

Registration is now open for Design Like an Architect, the second season of Ozobot’s Code & Conquer virtual STEM competition. This year, we’re inviting all K–5 educators and their students to join us with Evo or Ari robots.

Your students will work together to imagine a space, draw their design, and code their robot to bring it to life. Along the way, they’ll test ideas, learn from each other, and discover how thoughtful design can help the people and wildlife around them.

And we have something especially fun planned for the winners: their designs will become official Ozobot mats. We’ll also fly the winning coach to ISTE to present their team’s work in the Ozobot booth!

We can’t wait to see what your students build.

The Competition at a Glance

Three Design Briefs

Architects start by asking questions. Who will use this space? What do they need? How can the design help?

Your students will start there, too.

Teams will explore three design briefs, sketching an idea for each before choosing one to develop into their final project.

1. A space for people

The Community Brief invites students to design somewhere people can gather, play, move, or rest. It could be a park, a playground, a main street, or a library plaza.

Who will visit? Where will they go? What would make the space welcoming and useful for everyone?

Ozobot takes on the role of a person using the space, helping students show how their choices work.

2. A space for wildlife

The Ecosystem Brief asks students to design a space that people create for a creature, such as a pollinator garden, frog pond, wetland, or bird nesting area.

Students consider what their creature needs: food, water, shelter, and a safe path through its environment.

Their robot might become a bee moving between flowers, a turtle exploring a wetland, or a bird visiting a nesting area.

3. A space for people and nature

The Build Brief brings the two together. Students design one space that helps people and nature at the same time.

Think of a school garden that grows food and feeds bees, or a shady place to sit beside a rain garden. Ozobot can represent a person, a creature, or both.

There’s room for your students to take these ideas in their own direction. The important part is being able to explain who their space serves and why their design helps.

You can participate with either Evo or Ari. No additional Ozobot products or specialty competition kits are required.

Students will use everyday classroom supplies, including butcher paper and drawing materials, to create their designs. The finished mat can be no larger than 24 × 33 inches.

Teams can use Color Codes or block-based coding, as appropriate for their robot. K–2 teams will code at least three movements or behaviors, and grades 3–5 teams will code at least four.

Each behavior should connect to a feature of the design. A pause might represent someone resting at a reading bench. A spin might show a child playing at the playground. A color change might mark a visit to a pond.

The code helps students explain their ideas—and gives them a way to test those ideas in action.

What Will Students Learn?

Throughout the competition, students will practice skills they can bring back to other classroom work.

Creative problem-solving and spatial reasoning. Students will think about how a space fits together, draw plans from a bird’s-eye view, and make decisions within the project’s size and robot constraints.

Coding with a purpose. Students will connect coded behaviors to specific features in their designs, using their robot to demonstrate how someone or something moves through the space.

Testing and improving. A turn might be too tight. A path might need more room. Students will observe what happens, adjust their work, and try again. Those changes are an important part of the project.

Collaboration and communication. Teammates will share ideas, listen to different perspectives, and explain why they think one design is worth developing. Everyone has something to contribute.

Designing for others. Students will consider the needs of the people, plants, and animals their spaces support. Every bench, flower patch, and pathway should have a reason to be there.

By the end, students will have a finished design and a story to tell about how they got there.

How the Season Works

The competition follows a sequence you can plan around your team’s schedule:

1. Explore the briefs. Sketch one concept for each of the three challenges.

2. Choose together. Discuss the ideas and select the one your team wants to develop.

3. Build, code, and test. Draw the full-size design, run your robot through it, and make improvements.

4. Share your work. Prepare your final submission and explain what changed along the way.

Concept rounds are designed to fit a once-a-week meeting schedule. We recommend giving students most of their remaining time to develop, test, and improve their chosen design, with the final session or two reserved for their submission.

Educators will also have a student-facing introduction deck, a Coach Toolbox with judging rubrics and discussion prompts, and a Timeline & Submission Guide to help them plan.

Competition Timeline

What Will Teams Submit?

We want to see your students’ thinking, including what they tried and what they changed. Each team will submit:

• Their mat design: Drawn at scale on butcher paper, no larger than 24 × 33 inches.

• A video of up to five minutes: Include at least one uninterrupted robot run through the full design, plus a brief on-camera discussion of what changed between the original sketch and the final version and why.

• One photo: Show the final design with Ozobot on it.

• A written student reflection: Explain how the design solves the problem, why the team chose it over their other concepts, and what testing taught them about materials, line thickness, turns, or spacing.

Keep those early sketches! They’ll help students show how far their ideas have come.

How Projects Are Judged

Projects are scored across four equally weighted categories, worth 25 points each:

• Creativity and real-world problem-solving

• Engineering design process

• Ozobot coding integration

• Communication and storytelling

Students should be ready to explain their choices, show how their code connects to the design, and share how testing helped them improve it. The Coach Toolbox includes both the full judging rubric and a student-friendly version so your team knows what to work toward.

Let’s Celebrate What Your Students Create

One winning team in each division—K–2 and grades 3–5—will have its design produced as an official Ozobot mat and sent to its school.

We’ll also fly the winning coach to ISTE to present their team’s work in the Ozobot booth, giving fellow educators a chance to see what their students imagined and created.

Additional Spotlight Awards will recognize:

• Collaboration & Communication

• Global Impact

• Ingenuity

• Ozobot in Action

• Rookie Award for first-year teams

There are plenty of reasons to feel proud along the way: a teammate finding their voice, a piece of code finally working, or a group realizing that combining their ideas made the design better.

We look forward to celebrating those moments with you.

Come Build With Us!

Bring your students’ curiosity, their big ideas, and your Evo or Ari. We’ll provide the challenge—and we invite you to make it your own.

Visit ozobot.com to learn more and register your team for Design Like an Architect.

We can’t wait to see what your students build!