TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Better by Design
The purpose of this activity is to use a scientific method to determine the effect of control surfaces on a paper glider. The students will construct a paper airplane/glider and test its performance to determine the base characteristics...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Let's Get It There Fast
The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate how aircraft have decreased the amount of time it takes to transport people and cargo. Students will compute the time it takes to travel between two cities for several modes of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Balsa Glider Competition
The purpose of this activity is to bring together the students' knowledge of engineering and airplanes and the creation of a glider model to determine how each modification affects the flight. The students will use a design procedure...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design a Flying Machine
The purpose of this activity is for the students to draw a design for their own flying machine. They will apply their knowledge of aircraft design and the forces acting on them. The students will start with a brainstorming activity where...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cost Comparisons
Students learn about the many types of expenses associated with building a bridge. Working like engineers, they estimate the cost for materials for a bridge member of varying sizes. After making calculations, they graph their results to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wind Energy
Students learn about wind energy by making a pinwheel to model a wind turbine. Just like engineers, they decide where and how their turbine works best by testing it in different areas of the playground.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Down There?
During this activity, students will learn how oil is formed and where in the Earth we find it. Students will take a core sample to look for oil in a model of the Earth. They will analyze their sample and make an informed decision as to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Closer Look at Oil and Energy Consumption
Students analyze international oil consumption and production data. They make several graphs to organize the data and draw conclusions about the overall use of oil in the world.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Powering Smallsburg
In this activity, students act as power engineers by specifying the power plants to build for a community. They are given a budget, an expected power demand from the community, and different power plant options with corresponding...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Happened to the Water? Designing Ways to Get and Clean
In this scenario-based activity, students design ways to either clean a water source or find a new water source, depending on given hypothetical family scenarios. They act as engineers to draw and write about what they could do to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Acid Attack
In this activity, students explore the effect of chemical erosion on statues and monuments. They use chalk to see what happens when limestone is placed in liquids with different pH values. They also learn several things that engineers...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Completing the Circuit
In the everyday electrical devices we use - calculators, remote controls and cell phones - a voltage source such as a battery is required to close the circuit and operate the device. In this hands-on activity, students use a battery,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bulbs & Batteries in a Row
Everyday we are surrounded by circuits that use "in parallel" and "in series" circuitry. Complicated circuits designed by engineers are composed of many simpler parallel and series circuits. During this activity, students build a simple...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Swinging Pendulum
This activity demonstrates how potential energy (PE) can be converted to kinetic energy (KE) and back again. Given a pendulum height, students calculate and predict how fast the pendulum will swing by understanding conservation of energy...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Power, Work and the Waterwheel
Waterwheels are devices that generate power and do work. Students construct a waterwheel using two-liter bottles, dowel rods and index cards, and calculate the power created and work done by them.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bouncing Balls
Students examine how different balls react when colliding with different surfaces, giving plenty of opportunity for them to see the difference between elastic and inelastic collisions, learn how to calculate momentum, and understand the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Swinging Pendulum
This activity shows students the engineering importance of understanding the laws of mechanical energy. More specifically, it demonstrates how potential energy can be converted to kinetic energy and back again. Given a pendulum height,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bouncing Balls (For High School)
In this activity, students examine how different balls react when colliding with different surfaces. Also, they will have plenty of opportunity to learn how to calculate momentum and understand the principle of conservation of momentum.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sliders
In this hands-on activity, students learn about two types of friction - static and kinetic - and the equation that governs them. They also measure the coefficient of static friction experimentally.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sliders (For High School)
In this hands-on activity, students learn about two types of friction - static and kinetic - and the equation that governs them. They also measure the coefficient of static friction and the coefficient of kinetic friction experimentally.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Ramp and Review
In this hands-on activity - rolling a ball down an incline and having it collide into a cup - the concepts of mechanical energy, work and power, momentum, and friction are all demonstrated. During the activity, students take measurements...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Ramp and Review (For High School)
In this hands-on activity - rolling a ball down an incline and having it collide into a cup - the concepts of mechanical energy, work and power, momentum, and friction are all demonstrated. During the activity, students take measurements...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is Energy? Short Demos
Three short, hands-on, in-class demos expand students' understand of energy. First, using peanuts and heat, students see how the human body burns food to make energy. Then, students create paper snake mobiles to explore how heat energy...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Energy Detectives at Work
Students search for clues of energy around them. They use what they find to create their own definition of energy. They also relate their energy clues to the engineering products they encounter every day.