TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Truss Destruction
Students work within constraints to construct model trusses and then test them to failure as a way to evaluate the relative strength of different truss configurations and construction styles. Each student group uses Popsicle sticks and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Viking Ship Design Challenge
In this design challenge, students learn about the Vikings from an engineering point-of-view. While investigating the history and anatomy of Viking ships, they learn how engineering solutions are shaped by the surrounding environment and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Save a Life, Clean Some Water!
Student teams practice water quality analysis through turbidity measurement and coliform bacteria counts. They use information about water treatment processes to design prototype small-scale water treatment systems and test the influent...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flood Analysis
Students learn how to use and graph real-world stream gage data to create hydrographs and calculate flood frequency statistics. They also learn how hydrographs help engineers make decisions and recommendations to community stakeholders...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Building a Barometer
Students investigate the weather from a systems approach, learning how individual parts of a system work together to create a final product. Students learn how a barometer works to measure the Earth's air pressure by building a model out...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Weather Alert
Students discuss the characteristics of storms, including the relationship of weather fronts and storms. Using simple materials, the students develop a model of a simple lightning detection system and analyze their model to determine its...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Backyard Weather Station
In this hands-on activity, students use their senses to describe what the weather is doing and to predict what it might do next. After gaining a basic understanding of weather patterns, students will become state park engineers and build...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Protecting Our City With Levees
Students design and build their own model levees. Acting as engineers for their city, teams create sturdy barriers to prevent water from flooding a city in the event of a hurricane.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trash to Treasure!
Student teams use the engineering design process to create a useful product of their choice out of recyclable items and "trash." The class is given a "landfill" of reusable items, such as aluminum cans, cardboard, paper, juice boxes,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design a Net Zero Energy Classroom
Students create a concept design of their very own net-zero energy classroom by pasting renewable energy and energy-efficiency items into and around a pretend classroom on a sheet of paper. They learn how these items (such as solar...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Am I on the Radio?
During this activity, students create a working radio by soldering circuit components supplied from an AM radio kit. Since this activity is carried out in conjunction with the associated lessons concerning circuits and how an AM radio...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor?
In the first part of the activity, each student chews a piece of gum until it loses its flavor, and then leaves the gum to dry for several days before weighing it to determine the amount of mass lost. This mass corresponds to the amount...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bombs Away!
In this hands-on activity students learn create a device to protect a dropped egg and deliver it close to a target. Students learn about engineering as well as potential and kinetic energy and energy transfer
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Fast Can a Carrot Rot?
Students conduct experiments to determine what environmental factors favor decomposition by soil microbes. They use chunks of carrots for the materials to be decomposed, and their experiments are carried out in plastic bags filled with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Determining Densities
Students will use two different methods to determine the densities of a variety of materials and objects. The first method involves direct measurement of the volumes of objects that have simple geometric shapes, while the second uses the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Place in Space
The students will use a "real" 3D coordinate system. They will have 3 axes at right angles, and a plane (the XY plane) that will be able to slide up and down the Z axis. The students will then be given several coordinates and asked to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cereal Magnets
In this activity, students will design a process that removes the most iron from the cereal. This activity is meant for the students to experiment with different materials using what they know about iron, magnets, and forces to design...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sliding and Stuttering
Students use a spring scale to drag an object such as a ceramic coffee cup along a table top or the floor. The spring scale allows them to measure the frictional force that exists between the moving cup and the surface it slides on. By...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Weight Matter?
Using the same method for measuring friction that was used in the previous lesson (Discovering Friction), students design and conduct an experiment to determine if weight added incrementally to an object affects the amount of friction...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Heave Ho!
Students will discover the scientific basis for the use of inclined planes. They will explore, using a spring scale, a bag of rocks and an inclined plane, how dragging objects up a slope is easier than lifting them straight up into the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Puck Stops Here
After learning about transfer of energy, specifically the loss of kinetic energy to friction, students get a chance to test friction. In groups they are given a wooden block, different fabrics, and weights and asked to design the "best"...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Strum Along
Music and sound are two different concepts that share much in common. Determining the difference between the two can sometimes be difficult due to the subjective nature of deciding what is or is not music. The goal of this activity is to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Simple Coulter Counter
Students build and use a very basic Coulter electric sensing zone particle counter to count an unknown number of particles in a sample of "paint" to determine if enough particles per ml of paint exist to meet a quality standard. In a lab...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cooking With the Sun Creating a Solar Oven
For this activity, students will be given a set of materials: cardboard, a set of insulating materials (i.e. foam, newspaper, etc.), aluminum foil, and Plexiglas. Students will then become engineers in building a solar oven from the...