TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: That's Hot! Robot Brain Programming
With the challenge to program computers to mimic the human reaction after touching a hot object, students program LEGO robots to "react" and move back quickly once their touch sensors bump into something. By relating human senses to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Commanding a Robot Using Sound
Students continue their exploration of the human senses and their engineering counterparts, focusing on the auditory sense. Working in small groups, students design, create and run programs to control the motion of LEGO TaskBots. By...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hearing: How Do Our Ears Work?
Students learn about the anatomy of the ear and how the ears work as a sound sensor. Ear anatomy parts and structures are explained in detail, as well as how sound is transmitted mechanically and then electrically through them to the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sound From Left or Right?
Why do humans have two ears? How do the properties of sound help with directional hearing? Students learn about directional hearing and how our brains determine the direction of sounds by the difference in time between arrival of sound...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Pupillary Response & Test Your Reaction Time
Students observe and test their reflexes, including the (involuntary) pupillary response and (voluntary) reaction times using their dominant and non-dominant hands, as a way to further explore how reflexes occur in humans. They gain...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Understanding Movement in Humans and Robots
This activity helps students understand how a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot moves using motors and wheels. Then students relate the concepts of decision-making actuation and motion in humans to their parallels in mechanized robots, and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Understanding Communication With a Robot
Student pairs first act out the instructions a robot is given with one person providing instructions and the other person following the instructions. This activity helps students understand how a robot is programmed and with what type of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Nxt Ball Shooter
This activity helps students understand how a motor in a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot uses electricity produced by the battery to move a robot to do useful work in the form of throwing a ball. Students relate the concepts of electricity and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Movement Task Using Sensors Humans and Robots
This activity helps students understand the significance of programming and also how the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot's sensors assist its movement and make programming easier. Students compare human senses to robot sensors, describing...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Android App Development
Students develop an app for an Android device that utilizes its built-in internal sensors, specifically the accelerometer. The goal of this activity is to teach programming design and skills using MIT's App Inventor software (free to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Exploring Acceleration With an Android
Students conduct an experiment to study the acceleration of a mobile Android device. During the experiment, they run an application created with MIT's App Inventor that monitors linear acceleration in one-dimension. Students use an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flow Charting App Inventor Tutorials
Students design and create flow charts for the MIT App Inventor tutorials in this computer science activity about program analysis. In program analysis, which is based on determining the behavior of computer programs, flow charts are an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graphing the Spread of Disease
Students simulate disease transmission by collecting data based on their proximity to other students. One option for measuring proximity is by having Bluetooth devices "discover" each other. After data is collected, students apply graph...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Mars Rover App Creation
Based on their experience exploring the Mars rover Curiosity and learning about what engineers must go through to develop a vehicle like Curiosity, students create Android apps that can control LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots, simulating the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graphing Your Social Network
Students analyze their social networks using graph theory. They gather data on their own social relationships, either from Facebook interactions or the interactions they have throughout the course of a day, recording it in Microsoft...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Testing With J Unit
JUnit is a testing method that is included with NetBeans (Java) installs or can be downloaded from the web and included in the Java build. In this activity, students design tests for a provided Java class before the class methods are...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: An Implementation of Steganography
Students apply the design process to the problem of hiding a message in a digital image using steganographic methods, a PictureEdit Java class, and API (provided as an attachment). They identify the problems and limitations associated...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Estimating the Storage Capacity of a Cd/dvd
Students estimate the storage capacity of CDs and DVDs by assessing diffraction patterns of green and red laser beams.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who Can Make the Best Coordinate System?
Students learn about coordinate systems in general by considering questions concerning what it is that the systems are expected do, and who decided how they look. They attempt to make their own coordinate systems using a common area...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Wrong With the Coordinates at the North Pole?
Students complete a self-guided exercise in worksheet format combined with Google Earth that helps them explore practical and observable differences between different projection and coordinate systems. The activity improves their skills...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Get the Word Out at Mc Donalds!
Students take part in a hypothetical scenario that challenges them to inform customers at a local restaurant of how their use and disposal of plastics relates/contributes to the Great Pacific garbage patch (GPGP). What students...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Searching for Bigfoot and Others Like Him
Cryptids, creatures of questionable existence, are used as a source of data to guide students into the creation of their own GIS data layer in Google Earth. The activity serves the purpose of a tutorial to teach students how to make data...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Where Are the Plastics Near Me? (Field Trip)
An adult-led field trip allows students to be organized into investigation teams that catalogue the incidence of plastic debris in different environments. These plastics are being investigated according to their type, age, location and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Where Are the Plastics Near Me? (Mapping the Data)
In a student-led and fairly independent fashion, data collected in the associated field trip activity are organized by student groups to create useful and informative Google Earth maps. Each team creates a map, uses that map to analyze...