TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Potato Power
Students use potatoes to light an LED clock (or light bulb) as they learn how a battery works in a simple circuit and how chemical energy changes to electrical energy. As they learn more about electrical energy, they better understand...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Conductivity
Students make a simple conductivity tester using a battery and light bulb. They learn the difference between conductors and insulators of electrical energy as they test a variety of materials for their ability to conduct electricity.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Grid
The class forms a "Presidential Task Force" for a week, empowered by the president to find answers and make recommendations concerning the future of the national power grid. Task force members conduct daily debriefings with their...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Make Your Own Temperature Scale
Students learn about the difference between temperature and thermal energy. They build a thermometer using simple materials and develop their own scale for measuring temperature. They compare their thermometer to a commercial...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Windmill of Your Mind: Distributed Energy Goes to School
Students research the feasibility of installing a wind-turbine distributed energy (DE) system for their school. They write a proposal (actually, the executive summary of a proposal) to the school principal based on their findings and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Falling Water
Students drop water from different heights to demonstrate the conversion of water's potential energy to kinetic energy. They see how varying the height from which water is dropped affects the splash size. They follow good experiment...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Waterwheel Work
Students learn the history of the waterwheel and common uses for water turbines today. They explore kinetic energy by creating their own experimental waterwheel from a two-liter plastic bottle. They investigate the transformations of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Case of Innovation
A white paper is a focused analysis often used to describe how a technology solves a problem. In this literacy activity, students write a simplified version of a white paper on an alternative electrical power generation technology. In...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Capturing the Sun's Warmth
In the exploration of ways to use solar energy, students investigate the thermal energy storage capacities of different test materials to determine which to use in passive solar building design.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: You're in Hot Water
To explore different ways of using solar energy, students build a model solar water heater and determine how much it can heat water in a given amount of time. Solar water heaters work by solar radiation and convection.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cooking With the Sun
Students learn about using renewable energy from the Sun for heating and cooking as they build and compare the performance of four solar cooker designs. They explore the concepts of insulation, reflection, absorption, conduction and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Power to the People
Students read and evaluate descriptions of how people live "off the grid" using solar power and come to understand better the degree to which that lifestyle is or is not truly independent of technological, economic and cultural...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Oil Spill Cleanup
This hands-on experiment will provide students with an understanding of the issues that surround environmental cleanup. Students will create their own oil spill, try different methods for cleaning it up, and then discuss the merits of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Groundwater Detectives
Student teams locate a contaminant spill in a hypothetical site by measuring the pH of soil samples. Then they predict the direction of groundwater flow using mathematical modeling. They also use the engineering design process to come up...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cleaning the Air
Engineers design methods of removing particulate matter from industrial sources to minimize negative effects of air pollution. In this activity, students will undertake a similar engineering challenge as they design and build a filter to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Environmental Interactions
In this activity, students create a "web" to identify and demonstrate the interactions among the living and non-living parts of an environment. This information allows students to better understand what an environment is and to also...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: This Landfill Is a Gas!
In this activity, students work as engineers to build and observe a model landfill. They will understand the process and pitfalls of the use of landfills as a method for the waste disposal.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: It's All in the Package
In this activity, students explore the concept of "reducing" solid waste and how it relates to product packaging and engineering advancements in packaging materials. Students read about and evaluate the highly publicized packaging...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Gotten Into You?
In this activity, students use models to investigate the process and consequences of water contamination on the land, groundwater, and plants. This is a good introduction to building water filters found in the associated activity, The...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Dirty Water Project
In this activity, students investigate different methods (aeration and filtering) for removing pollutants from water. They will design and build their own water filters.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land
In this activity, students will review and evaluate the ways land is covered and used in their local community. They will also consider the environmental effects of the different types of land use. Students will act as community planning...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Solar Power
In this activity, students learn how engineers use solar energy to heat buildings by investigating the thermal storage properties of some common materials: sand, salt, water and shredded paper. Students then evaluate the usefulness of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Fancy Feet
Students use the engineering design process to solve a real-world problem - shoe engineering! Working in small teams, students design, build and test a pair of wearable platform or high-heeled shoes, taking into consideration the stress...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Solar Water Heater
Student teams design and build solar water heating devices that mimic those used in residences to capture energy in the form of solar radiation and convert it to thermal energy. This thermal energy is next transferred to water (to be...