Design Squad

What’s the Story?

Tween-oriented reality show DESIGN SQUAD features eight high schoolers who put their brains -- and sometimes their brawn -- to the ultimate engineering test in a competition to build a variety of machines. Sample challenges include building a dragster, a pancake cooker and flipper, a peanut-butter maker, and a pump to deliver water to an 11-foot water slide. The four boys and four girls are split into two teams to devise solutions to the challenges; over the course of two days, the teens brainstorm, design, and build their apparatus entirely by themselves, running performance tests, troubleshooting, and -- more often than not -- redesigning their creations when necessary. When their time is up, the teams' efforts are judged by a professional engineer. Each member of a particular challenge's winning team racks up points that accumulate throughout the 13-week competition (the teams are shuffled and reassigned for each new contest); the teen engineer with the highest point total at the end of the series wins a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

Is It Any Good?

Design Squad proves that if it's done right, reality TV can be both fun and functional. Although it's a competition at heart, the show steers clear of the bad blood that the elimination process produces and focuses instead on celebrating the ingenuity and collaboration of its young engineers. Because the teams change with each new challenge, contestants must work with many different peers under ever-changing circumstances, and this results in a group that takes setbacks and losses in stride and even manages to -- gulp! -- heartily congratulate the competition on jobs well done.

If your tweens are prone to thinking outside the box (or, for that matter, if they need a nudge in that direction), this fun, fast-paced series is sure to get their creative juices flowing. And it's so entertaining to watch the teams' endeavors that you just might want to tune in, too.