Engineering has led the way in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, including developing masks that reduce transmission, digital tools that allow contact tracing, and vaccines that show promise to put an end to the pandemic and allow a more normal way of life. Society is not only "following the science," but is also applying principles of engineering to human problems to create timely and needed solutions. Teaching principles of engineering in classrooms should involve more than simply working through preconceived design challenges. It should be a way to position students with agency--that is, to offer them a chance to see themselves as capable of solving problems in their homes and communities. In this article, the authors describe a unit that was implemented in second grade to demonstrate how the engineering design process (EDP) afforded agency to one teacher's elementary students (this unit was adapted for use with third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students as well). The learning experiences allowed students to solve societally relevant problems, especially those they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. When students selected problems encountered during the pandemic, the teacher did not ask them to find a new, easier, or less contentious problem; instead, she took the opportunity to empower her students to respond to the pandemic in their own ways.