TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Built to Last?
In this activity, the students test the shelters they built in Lesson 3, Activity 1 for durability and water resistance.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Finding Food in the Amazon
In this activity, the students will investigate a variety of plants and animals common to the Amazon through research. They will determine the plant or animal characteristics that make them edible or useful for the trip and learn to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Anchors Away
In this activity, the students will discover the relationship between an object's mass and the amount of space it takes up (its volume). The students will learn about the concept of displacement and how an object can float if it...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Taking the Boat to Manaus
In this activity, the students will apply the concepts they learned regarding mass, volume and density in the previous activities to design a boat.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Eye Witness Reporting
In this activity, the students will develop a briefing for a T.V. evening news program that summarizes their experiences surviving in the Amazon rainforest. The students will have the opportunity to role play as interviewer and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Recipe for Air
Students use M&M's to create a pie graph that expresses their understanding of the composition of air. The students discuss why knowing this information is important to engineers.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Air Is It Really There?
By watching and performing several simple experiments, students develop an understanding of the properties of air: it has mass, it takes up space, it can move, it exerts pressure, it can do work.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: For Your Eyes Only
Students develop their understanding of visible air pollutants with an incomplete combustion demonstration, a "smog in a jar" demonstration, and by building simple particulate matter collectors.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Green Marketing
Students learn basic marketing concepts and use professional marketing techniques to compose an advertisement for a hybrid vehicle. In the process, they learn the principles of comparative analysis.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Hiding in the Air?
Students develop an understanding of the effects of invisible air pollutants with a rubber band and hanger air test and a bean plant experiment. They also learn about methods of reducing invisible air pollutants.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Tears in Rain
The goal of this activity is for students to develop visual literacy. They learn how images are manipulated for a powerful effect and how a photograph can make the invisible (pollutants that form acid rain) visible (through the damage...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: I Can't Take the Pressure!
Students develop an understanding of air pressure by using candy or cookie wafers to model how it changes with altitude, by comparing its magnitude to gravitational force per unit area, and by observing its magnitude with an aluminum can...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dripping Wet or Dry as a Bone?
Students use a sponge and water model to explore the concept of relative humidity and create a percent scale.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Turning the Air Upside Down
Students develop their understanding of air convection currents and temperature inversions by constructing and observing simple models.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Take Their Word for It!
Students learn how scientific terms are formed using Latin and Greek roots, prefixes and suffixes, and on that basis, learn to make an educated guess about the meaning of a word. Students are introduced to the role played by metaphor in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Moving Without Wheels
In a class demonstration, students observe a simple water cycle model to better understand its role in pollutant transport. This activity shows one way in which pollution is affected by the water cycle; it simulates a point source of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Acid (And Base) Rainbows
Students are introduced to the differences between acids and bases and how to use indicators, such as pH paper and red cabbage juice, to distinguish between them.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Is That Legal? A Case of Acid Rain
The goal of this activity is to understand how techniques of persuasion (including background, supporting evidence, storytelling and the call to action) are used to develop an argument for or against a topic. Students develop an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hot Stuff!
Students observe demonstrations, and build and evaluate simple models to understand the greenhouse effect and the role of increased greenhouse gas concentration in global warming.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Battling for Oxygen
Using gumdrops and toothpicks, students conduct a large-group, interactive ozone depletion model. Students explore the dynamic and competing upper atmospheric roles of the protective ozone layer, the sun's UV radiation and harmful...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Metamorphosis Stories of Change
The goal of this activity is for students to learn how to tell a story in order to make a complex topic (such as global warming or ozone holes) easier for a reader to grasp. Students realize that the narrative impulse underlies even...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Washing Air
Students observe and discuss a simple model of a wet scrubber to understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Pop Ups
Students learn about applied forces as they create pop-up-books - the art of paper engineering. They also learn the basic steps of the engineering design process.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Population Density: How Much Space Do You Have?
Students learn about population density within environments and ecosystems. They determine the density of a population and think about why population density and distribution information is useful to engineers for city planning and...