TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Optimization of Slime
Using their knowledge of the phases of matter, the scientific method, and polymers, student teams work as if they are chemical engineers to optimize the formula for slime. Hired by the fictional company, Slime Productions, students are...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Organic Solar Energy and Berries
Students learn about how a device made with dye from a plant, specifically cherries, blackberries, raspberries and/or black currents, can be used to convert light energy into electrical energy. They do this by building their own organic...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bridging to Polymers: Thermoset Lab
Students act as engineers to learn about the strengths of various epoxy-amine mixtures, and observe the unique characteristics of different mixtures of epoxies and hardeners. Student groups make and optimize thermosets by combining two...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flying With Style
As students begin to understand the physics behind thrust, drag, and gravity and how these relate these to Newton's three laws of motion, groups assemble and launch the rockets that they designed in the associated lesson.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Element, Mixture, Compound
This hands-on activity will help the students have a better understanding of different types of materials as pure substances and mixtures and distinguishes the homogeneous and heterogeneous mixtures by discussing some material they use...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Eat Iron?!!
To gain an understanding of mixtures and the concept of separation of mixtures, students use strong magnets to find the element of iron in iron-fortified breakfast cereal flakes. Through this activity, they see how the iron component of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's a Wavelength?
Students measure the wavelength of sounds and learn basic vocabulary associated with waves. As a class, they brainstorm the difference between two tuning forks and the sounds they produce. Then they come up with a way to measure that...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wizardry and Chemistry
Students learn how common pop culture references (Harry Potter books) can relate to chemistry. While making and demonstrating their own low-intensity sparklers (muggle-versions of magic wands), students learn and come to appreciate the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Working Together to Live Together
Students experience civil and environmental engineering by planning a housing development in an existing biome, while also protecting the native species that live there. They conduct research, draw plans, make brochures and give...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Great Algae Race
In a multi-week experiment, student groups gather data from the photobioreactors that they build to investigate growth conditions that make algae thrive best.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Composting Competition
In a multi-week experiment, students monitor the core temperatures of two compost piles, one control and one tended, to see how air and water affect microbial activity.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dome It Challenge Scenario Cards
Student teams find solutions to hypothetical challenge scenarios that require them to sustainably manage both resources and wastes.
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Teach Engineering: Things That Matter to Flocculants
Prior to reaching households, water is exposed to a variety of treatments designed to render it fit for human consumption and use. One of the first treatment steps is the removal of suspended solids using chemical additives called...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: At the Doctor's
In this simulation of a doctor's office, students play the roles of physician, nurse, patients, and time-keeper, with the objective to improve the patient waiting time. They collect and graph data as part of their analysis. This serves...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Whose Field Line Is It, Anyway?
Students teams each use a bar magnet, sheet of paper and iron shavings to reveal the field lines as they travel around a magnet. They repeat the activity with an electromagnet made by wrapping thin wire around a nail and connecting...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Good, the Bad and the Electromagnet
Using plastic straws, wire, batteries and iron nails, student teams build and test two versions of electromagnets-one with and one without an iron nail at its core. They test each magnet's ability pick up loose staples, which reveals the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Microbes Know How to Work!
Students design systems that use microbes to break down a water pollutant (in this case, sugar). They explore how temperature affects the rate of pollutant decomposition.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Grow Your Own Algae!
Students discover how tiny microscopic plants can remove nutrients from polluted water. They also learn how to engineer a system to remove pollutants faster and faster by changing the environment for the algae.
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Teach Engineering: Natural and Urban "Stormwater" Water Cycle Models
Students apply their understanding of the natural water cycle and the urban stormwater water cycle, as well as the processes involved in both cycles to hypothesize how the flow of water is affected by altering precipitation.
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Teach Engineering: Just Breathe Green: Measuring Transpiration Rates
Through multi-trial experiments, students are able to see and measure something that is otherwise invisible to them- seeing plants transpire. This information will allow students to consider how a plant's unique characteristics (leaf...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Media Matter? Infiltration Rates and Storage Capacities
Students gain a basic understanding of the properties of media- soil, sand, compost, gravel- and how these materials affect the movement of water (infiltration/percolation) into and below the surface of the ground.
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Teach Engineering: Making "Magic" Sidewalks of Pervious Pavement
Students use everyday building materials- sand, pea gravel, cement and water- to create and test pervious pavement. Groups are challenged to create their own pervious pavement mixes, experimenting with material ratios to evaluate how...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Guide to Rain Garden Construction
Student groups create personal rain gardens planted with native species to provide a green infrastructure and low-impact development technology solution for areas with poor drainage that often flood during storm events.
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Teach Engineering: Tension Racers!
Students see how different levels of surface tension affect water's ability to move. Teams "race" water droplets down tracks made of different materials, making measurements, collecting data, making calculations, graphing results and...