TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Rocket Power
By making and testing simple balloon rockets, students acquire a basic understanding of Newton's third law of motion as it applies to rockets. Using balloons, string, straws and tape, they see how rockets are propelled by expelling...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Spacecraft Design: Beat the Heat
To understand the challenges of satellite construction, student teams design and create model spacecraft to protect vital components from the harsh conditions found on Mercury and Venus. They use slices of butter in plastic eggs to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Slingshot to the Outer Planets
Students are introduced to the engineering challenges involved with interplanetary space travel. In particular, they learn about the gravity assist or "slingshot" maneuver often used by engineers to send spacecraft to the outer planets....
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: Solar Water: Heat It Up!
Students explore energy efficiency, focusing on renewable energy, by designing and building flat-plate solar water heaters. They apply their understanding of the three forms of heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation), as...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Musical Images
Students are introduced to the concept of the image of music. After listening to a song, they draw images of it by deciding where different musical instruments were placed during recording. They further investigate audio engineering by...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: String Telephones
Students investigate how sound travels through string and air. First, they analyze the sound waves with a paper cup attached to a string. Then, they combine the string and cup with a partner to model a string telephone. Finally, they are...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Form vs. Function
Students model and design the sound environment for a room. They analyze the sound performance of different materials that represent wallpaper, thick curtains, and sound-absorbing panels. Then, referring to the results of their analysis,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Into Space!
While building and testing model rockets fueled by antacid tablets, students are introduced to the basic physics concepts on how rockets work. Students revise and improve their initial designs. Note: This activity is similar to the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Earth Impact
This activity poses the question: What would happen if a meteor or comet impacted Earth? Students simulate an impact in a container of sand using various-sized rocks, all while measuring, recording and graphing results and conclusions....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Building a Fancy Spectrograph
Students create and decorate their own spectrographs using simple materials and holographic diffraction gratings. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual components of light. After building the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Your Own Spectrograph
Students use simple materials to design an open spectrograph so they can calculate the angle light is bent when it passes through a holographic diffraction grating. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Spectroscopy Mission
Students find and calculate the angle that light is transmitted through a holographic diffraction grating using trigonometry. After finding this angle, student teams design and build their own spectrographs, researching and designing a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sum It Up: An Introduction to Static Equilibrium
Students are introduced to static equilibrium by learning how forces and torques are balanced in a well-designed engineering structure. A tower crane is presented as a simplified two-dimensional case. Using Popsicle sticks and hot glue,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: It Burns!
In this activity, students learn how to prevent exposure to the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Students will systematically test various sunscreens to determine the relationship between spf (sun protection factor) value and sun...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Challenges of Laparoscopic Surgery
Students teams use a laparoscopic surgical trainer to perform simple laparoscopic surgery tasks (dissections, sutures) using laparoscopic tools. Just like in the operating room, where the purpose is to perform surgery carefully and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Robotic Surgical Device
Student teams create laparoscopic surgical robots designed to reduce the invasiveness of diagnosing endometriosis and investigate how the disease forms and spreads. Using a synthetic abdominal cavity simulator, students test and iterate...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Hooke's Law to Understand Materials
Students explore the response of springs to forces as a way to begin to understand elastic solid behavior. They gain experience in data collection, spring constant calculation, and comparison and interpretation of graphs and material...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Measuring Viscosity
Students calculate the viscosity of various household fluids by measuring the amount of time it takes marble or steel balls to fall given distances through the liquids. They experience what viscosity means, and also practice using...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Creepy Silly Putty
Students learn about viscoelastic material behavior, such as strain rate dependence and creep, by using silly putty, an easy-to-make polymer material. They learn how to make silly putty, observe its behavior with different strain rates,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Preconditioning Balloons
Students use balloons (a polymer) to explore preconditioning a viscoelastic material behavior that is important to understand when designing biomedical devices. They improve their understanding of preconditioning by measuring the force...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Temperature Tells All!
Students are introduced to the health risks caused by cooking and heating with inefficient cook stoves inside homes, a common practice in rural developing communities. Students simulate the cook stove scenario and use the engineering...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Tower O' Power
In this activity, students learn about creating a design directly from a CAD (computer-aided design) program. They will design a tower in CAD and manufacture the parts with a laser cutter. A competition determines the tower design with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Truss Destruction
Students work within constraints to construct model trusses and then test them to failure as a way to evaluate the relative strength of different truss configurations and construction styles. Each student group uses Popsicle sticks and...