TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Watt Meters to Measure Energy Consumption
Students use watt meters to measure the power required and calculate energy used from various electrical devices and household appliances.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Renew a Bead
A quantitative illustration of how non-renewable resources are depleted while renewable resources continue to provide energy. The activity requires students to remove beads (units of energy) from a bag (representing a country). A certain...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Energy in Our Lives Carousel
This activity is a way for students to discover that they already know a lot about energy through their own life experiences. As active consumers of various forms of energy, they are aware of energy purchases for electricity, home...
University of Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
This resource provides information about engineering programs and education.
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: Saltwater Circuit
Students build a saltwater circuit, which is an electrical circuit that uses saltwater as part of the circuit. Students investigate the conductivity of saltwater, and develop an understanding of how the amount of salt in a solution...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Water Desalination Plant
Students use a thermal process approach to design, build and test a small-scale desalination plant that is capable of significantly removing the salt content from a saltwater solution. Students use a saltwater circuit to test the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Snow vs. Water
Engineers work in many fields associated with precipitation. Engineers study glaciers to better understand their dates of formation and current demise. They deal with issues of pollution transport and water yield, and they monitor...
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: Recycled Towers
Students learn about material reuse by designing and building the strongest and tallest towers they can, using only recycled materials. They follow design constraints and build their towers to withstand earthquake and high wind simulations.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Power Your House With Water
Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Students work through the engineering design process to build...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineers Speak for the Trees
Students begin by reading Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" as an example of how overdevelopment can cause long-lasting environmental destruction. Students discuss how to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of human industry....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trig River
Students learn about and use a right triangle to determine the width of a "pretend" river. Working in teams, they estimate of the width of the river, measure it and compare their results with classmates.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design a Solar City
Students design and build a model city powered by the sun! They learn about the benefits of solar power, and how architectural and building engineers integrate photovoltaic panels into the design of buildings.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Measuring Light Pollution
Students are introduced to the concept of light pollution by investigating the nature, sources and levels of light in their classroom environment. They learn about the adverse effects of artificial light and the resulting consequences on...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Above Ground Storage Tank Design Project
In this culminating activity, student groups act as engineering design teams to come up with improved storage tank designs to make them less vulnerable to uplift, displacement and buckling in storm conditions.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Basically Acidic Ink
Students hypothesize whether vinegar and ammonia-based glass cleaner are acids or bases. They create designs on index cards using these substances as invisible inks. After the index cards have dried, they apply red cabbage juice as an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Make That Invisible! Refractive Index Matching
Students determine the refractive index of a liquid with a simple technique using a semi-circular hollow block. Then they predict the refractive index of a material (a Pyrex glass tube) by matching it with the known refractive index of a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Just Breathe Green: Measuring Transpiration Rates
Through multi-trial experiments, students are able to see and measure something that is otherwise invisible to them- seeing plants transpire. This information will allow students to consider how a plant's unique characteristics (leaf...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Media Matter? Infiltration Rates and Storage Capacities
Students gain a basic understanding of the properties of media- soil, sand, compost, gravel- and how these materials affect the movement of water (infiltration/percolation) into and below the surface of the ground.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Making "Magic" Sidewalks of Pervious Pavement
Students use everyday building materials- sand, pea gravel, cement and water- to create and test pervious pavement. Groups are challenged to create their own pervious pavement mixes, experimenting with material ratios to evaluate how...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Guide to Rain Garden Construction
Student groups create personal rain gardens planted with native species to provide a green infrastructure and low-impact development technology solution for areas with poor drainage that often flood during storm events.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Computer Simulation of the Sonoran Desert Community
The computer program's simulation of a Sonoran desert community should ultimately strengthen the student's comprehension of what is required for a natural ecosystem to sustain itself (remain in balance). This computer simulation program...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Light Intensity Lab
Students complete this Beer's Law activity in class. Students examine the attenuation of various thicknesses of transparencies. From this activity, students will understand that different substances absorb light differently. This can...