TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Rockets on a Shoestring Budget
In this activity, students revisit the Pop Rockets activity from Lesson 3. This time, however, the design of their pop-rockets will be limited by budgets and supplies. They will get a feel for the limitations of a real engineering...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Find It!
In this activity students will learn the basic concept of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) using triangulation and measurement on a small scale in the classroom. Students discover how GPS and navigation integrate mathematic and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Stack It Up!
Students analyze and begin to design a pyramid. Working in engineering teams, they perform calculations to determine the area of the pyramid base, stone block volumes, and the number of blocks required for their pyramid base. They make a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Choosing a Pyramid Site
Working in engineering project teams, students evaluate sites for the construction of a pyramid. They base their decision on site features as provided by a surveyor's report; distance from the quarry, river and palace; and other factors...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Solid Rock to Building Block
Students continue their pyramid building journey, acting as engineers to determine the appropriate wedge tool to best extract rock from a quarry and cut into pyramid blocks. Using sample materials (wax, soap, clay, foam) representing...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wheeling It In!
In an open-ended design activity, students use everyday materials (milk cartons, water bottles, pencils, straws, candy) to build a small-scale transportation device. They incorporate the use of a wheel and axle, and lever into their...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Make Some Waves
In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the different between longitudinal and transverse waves.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Simple Instruments
In this activity, students work with partners to create four different instruments to investigate the frequency of the sounds they make. Students may chose to make a shoebox guitar, water glass xylophone, straw panpipe or a soda bottle...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Controlling Sound
In this activity, students use a variety of materials to design and create headphones that absorb sound.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Light Scavengers
In this activity, students examine various materials and investigate how they interact with light. Students use five new vocabulary words (translucent, transparent, opaque, reflection and refraction) to describe how light interacts with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Visual Spectrum
In this activity, students make simple spectroscopes (prisms) to look at different light sources. The spectroscopes allow students to see differing spectral distributions of different light sources.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Create a Pinhole Camera
In this activity, students construct their own pinhole camera to observe the behavior of light.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Patterns and Fingerprints
Students apply several methods developed to identify and interpret patterns to the identification of fingerprints. They look at their classmates' fingerprints, snowflakes, and "spectral fingerprints" of elements. They learn to identify...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graphing the Rainbow
Students are introduced to different ways of displaying visual spectra, including colored "barcode" spectra, like those produced by a diffraction grating, and line plots displaying intensity versus color, or wavelength. Students learn...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Spectral Data to Explore Saturn and Titan
Students use authentic spectral data from the Cassini mission of Saturn and Saturn's moon, Titan, gathered by instrumentation developed by engineers. Taking these unknown data, and comparing it with known data, students determine the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using a Fancy Spectrograph
Students use the spectrograph from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about different light sources. Using the data, they make comparisons between the light sources and make conjectures about the composition of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Spectral Mystery
Students use the spectrograph from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about light sources. Using their data, they make comparisons between different light sources and make conjectures about the composition of a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Balsa Towers
Students will build their own towers using some of the techniques they have learned. The materials will consist of balsa wood and glue. General guidelines are provided, but the students will have a lot of freedom with their design to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Buoyant Boats
Students learn about displacement, density and buoyancy then apply their knowledge to build a floating object.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: New Boxes From Old
Students find the volume and surface area of a rectangular box (e.g., a cereal box), and then figure out how to convert that box into a new, cubical box having the same volume as the original. As they construct the new, cube-shaped box...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: All Caught Up
Commercial fishing nets often trap unprofitable animals in the process of catching their target species. In the following activity, students will experience the difficulty that fishermen experience while trying to isolate a target...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Let Your Ears Do the Walking
In the previous lesson, students learned about the issue of bycatching by fisheries and how it affects marine habitats. Dolphins are one of the main species affected by bycatching. Dolphins use echolocation to identify the location of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Can You Hear It?
In the previous lesson, students learned about the issue of bycatching by fisheries and how it affects marine habitats. Dolphins are one of the main species affected by bycatching. While dolphins can use echolocation to identify the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Yeast Cells Respire, Too (But Not Like Me and You)
Students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Each student adds a small amount of baking yeast to a test tube filled with diluted molasses. A second,...