TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Chair Design
Students become familiar with the Engineering Design Process as they design and build prototypes for a chair. The miniature chair must be sturdy and functional enough to hold a wooden, hinged artist model or floppy stuffed animal.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Car Collision Testing & Tradeoffs: Don't Crack Humpty
Student groups are provided with a generic car base on which to design a device/enclosure to protect an egg as it rolls down a ramp at increasing slopes. During this activity, student teams design, build and test their prototype...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Heat It Up!
Through a teacher demonstration using water, heat and food coloring, students see how convection moves the energy of the Sun from its core outwards. Students learn about the three different modes of heat transfer (convection, conduction,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Fairly Fundamental Facts About Forces & Structures
This lesson plan will introduce young scholars to the five fundamental loads: compression, tension, shear, bending, and torsion.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Food Packaging
This lesson focuses on how food packages are designed and made. Students will learn three of the main functions of a food package. They will learn what is necessary of the design and materials of a package to keep food clean, protect or...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Riding the Radio Waves
In this lesson learners learn how AM radios work through basic concepts about waves and magnetic fields. Waves are first introduced by establishing the difference between transverse and longitudinal waves, as well as identifying the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design and Build a Rube Goldberg
In this two-part activity, students design and build a Rube Goldberg machine. The open ended problem uses the engineering design process and can have a preset purpose, such as rolling a marble into a cup from a distance, or can be left...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Waves Go Public!
Students apply everything they have learned over the course of the associated lessons about waves, light properties, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the structure of the eye, by designing devices that can aid color blind people in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sensing Air Pollution
Students learn about electricity and air pollution while building devices to measure volatile organic compounds (VOC) by attaching VOC sensors to prototyping boards. In the second part of the activity, students evaluate the impact of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Balloons
Students follow the steps of the engineering design process as they design and construct balloons for aerial surveillance. After their first attempts to create balloons, they are given the associated Estimating Buoyancy lesson to learn...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Drawing Designs in Detail
Students practice creating rudimentary detail drawings. They learn how engineers communicate the technical information about their designs using the basic components of detail drawings. They practice creating their own drawings of a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Matter of Leaching
Students leach organic matter from soil to create a water sample with high dissolved organic matter content (DOM), and then make filters to see if the DOM can be removed. They experience the difficulties of removing DOM from water, and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Daylighting Design
Students explore the many different ways that engineers provide natural lighting to interior spaces. They analyze various methods of daylighting by constructing model houses from foam core board and simulating the sun with a desk lamp....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's to the Mine We Go
This activity simulates the extraction of limited, nonrenewable resources from a "mine," so students can experience first-hand how resource extraction becomes more difficult over time. Students gather data and graph their results to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineers Love Pizza, Too!
In this service-learning engineering project, students follow the steps of the engineering design process to design an assistive eating device for a client. More specifically, they design a prototype device to help a young girl who has a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: My Moon Colony
Students are introduced to the futuristic concept of the moon as a place people can inhabit. They brainstorm what people would need to live on the moon and then design a fantastic Moon colony and decide how to power it. Student use the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who's Hitchhiking in Your Food?
How can you tell if harmful bacteria are growing in your food? Students learn to culture bacteria in order to examine ground meat and bagged salad samples, looking for common foodborne bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella. After 2-7...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Population Growth Curves
Using Avida-ED freeware, students control a few factors in an environment populated with digital organisms, and then compare how changing these factors affects population growth. They experiment by altering the environment size (similar...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bacteria Are Everywhere!
Through this activity, students are introduced to the concept of engineering biological organisms and studying their growth to be able to identify periods of fast and slow growth. Students learn that bacteria are found everywhere,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Newton's Law of Cooling
Middle schoolers come to see the exponential trend demonstrated through the changing temperatures measured while heating and cooling a beaker of water. This task is accomplished by first appealing to students' real-life heating and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Simulating the Bug
Students modify a provided App Inventor code to design their own diseases. This serves as the evolution step in the software/systems design process. The activity is essentially a mini design cycle in which students are challenged to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Testing the Edges
Students gain experience using the software/systems (engineering) design process, specifically focusing on the testing phase. This problem-based learning activity uses the design process to solve open-ended challenges. In addition to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Battle of the Beams
Students explore the properties of composites using inexpensive materials and processing techniques. They create beams using Laffy Taffy and water, and a choice of various reinforcements (pasta, rice, candies) and fabricating...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Winning Guest Village in the Saguaro National Park
The Challenge Question of the Legacy Cycle draws the student into considering the engineering ingenuity of nature. It will force him to analyze, appreciate and understand the wisdom of these designs as the student team focuses on meeting...