Catapult Challenge

Design, build and launch. The Catapult Challenge transforms teams into medieval engineers with a very specific goal: to build a functional catapult and achieve the greatest possible impact. With limited materials, fair time and the minimum necessary instructions.

What looks like a construction game is, in reality, an intense exercise in shared leadership, problem-solving, and creativity under pressure.

The Catapult Challenge makes it clear who dives in and does, and who prefers to plan — and why both profiles are essential.

How does the Catapult Challenge work?

Each team receives the same basic materials and a time limit to design and build their own functional catapult. There is an engineering phase, a tweaking phase, and a competition phase where distance and accuracy are measured. The rules are simple but the design variables are infinite – and that makes it especially stimulating.

The teams quickly discover that the optimal design isn't the most obvious one, and that each adjustment requires consensus and the ability to compromise when data contradicts intuition.

What is this activity working on within the team?

Technical creativity, collective decision-making, and iterative error management. Winning teams are not always those with the best engineers – they are the ones who best distribute roles, listen to everyone's ideas, and adjust the design on the fly without wasting time in sterile debates.

What kind of company or team is it ideal for?

Teams with technical or analytical profiles who enjoy logic-based challenges, but it also works equally well with heterogeneous groups where no one knows anything about mechanics. The activity surprisingly levels the playing field.