TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wet Pennies
Students conduct a simple test to determine how many drops of each of three liquids can be placed on a penny before spilling over. The three liquids are water, rubbing alcohol, and vegetable oil; because of their different surface...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Lights On!
Students in this activity will build simple circuits using a battery, wires, and light bulbs. This activity allows students to examine how electricity is conducted through a light bulb using a battery as a power source. Students will...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Energetic Musical Instruments
Students will learn to apply the principles and concepts associated with energy and the transfer of energy in an engineering context through the designing and making of a musical instrument. The students must choose from a variety of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Benefits of Biodiversity
First, students toss coins to determine what traits a set of mouse parents possess, such as fur color, body size, heat tolerance, and running speed. Next they use coin tossing to determine the traits a mouse pup born to these parents...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Clay Boats
Each student uses a small quantity of modeling clay to make a boat that will float in a tub of water. The object is to build a boat that will hold as much weight as possible without sinking. In the process of designing and testing their...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Package Those Foods!
This activity provides students with the opportunity to create a food package for a specific food. The students have three components to focus on in the design of their food package. The package will have to keep the food clean, protect...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Heredity Mix 'N Match
This site includes a lesson plan designed to teach students how genetic traits are passed down from parents to offspring. Students will explore such concepts as random selection, chrosomes, genotypes and phenotypes using jelly beans and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hot Cans and Cold Cans
Students apply the concepts of conduction, convection, and radiation as they work in teams to solve two problems. One problem requires that they maintain the warm temperature of one soda can filled with water at approximately body...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bury Your Trash!
This activity will allow students to bury various pieces of trash in a plotted area of land outside. After approximately two to three months, the trash will be uncovered to allow the students to investigate what types of materials...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Lunar Lollipops
The students work in teams of two to discover the relative positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon that produce the different phases of the Moon. The students will be given a Styrofoam ball that they will attach to a pencil so that it looks...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Map That Habitat
Historically, sea floor mapping occurred with a more simple data collection method: soundings. Soundings are taken by dropping a weight with a pre-measured rope off the side of the boat and noting the measurement on the rope when the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Map a Buddy
This activity serves to introduce the concept of tracking and spatial movements of animals in relation to the environment in which they live. The following activity will aid student understanding of animal tracking and how technology...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Boxes Go Mobile
To display the results from the previous activity, each student designs and constructs a mobile that contains a duplicate of his or her original box, the new cube-shaped box of the same volume, the scraps that are left over from the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Trickles Down?
Permeability is the degree to which water or other liquids are able to flow through a material. Different substances such as soil, gravel, sand, and asphalt have varying levels of permeability. In this activity, students will explore...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bubbling Plants
Students learn a simple technique for quantifying the amount of photosynthesis that occurs in a given period of time, using a common water plant (Elodea). They can use this technique to compare the amounts of photosynthesis that occur...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Win That Bid! Selling Your Power Solution
A large part of engineering involves presenting products, concepts, and proposals to others in order to gain approval, funding, contracts, etc. The purpose of this activity is to fine-tune students' presentation skills while allowing...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Building Roller Coasters
In this hands-on activity students learn about the laws of physics by creating a marble roller coaster.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Racing With the Sun Creating a Solar Car
Students use engineering design principles to construct and test a fully solar powered car. Several options exist, though we recommend the "Junior Solar Sprint" (JSS) Car Kits that can be purchased with direction from the federal...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Surgical Resident for a Day
In this activity, students will become surgical residents for the day. As a team, they will be asked to use surgical instruments to complete a task inside of a black box. They will be able to see inside of the box with the help of a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: No Valve in Vain
In this activity, students will design and create their own heart valves out of a variety of materials given to them, including: waterproof tape, plastic tubing, flexible plastic sheets, foam sheets, scissors, clay, etc. This activity...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Tracking a Virus
Students simulate the spread of a virus such as HIV through a population by "sharing" (but not drinking) the water in a plastic cup with several classmates. Although invisible, the water in a few of the cups will already be tainted with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How to Make Yeast Cells Thrive
Students set up and run the experiments they designed in the lesson Population Growth in Yeasts, using simple yeast-molasses cultures in test tubes. Population growth is indicated by the amount of respiration occurring in the cultures,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Yogurt Cup Speakers
This lesson introduces students to the role of electricity and magnetism as they build a speaker. In addition, students explore properties of magnets, create an electromagnet, and determine the direction of a magnetic filed. They conduct...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Able Sports
This activity focuses on getting the students to think about disabilities and how they can make some aspects of life more difficult. The students are asked to pick a disability and design a new kind of sport for it.