TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Habitat Mapping
The marine environment is unique and requires technologies that can use sound to gather information since there is little light underwater. In this lesson, the students will be shown benthic habitat images produced by GIS. These images...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Marine Animal Tracking
This lesson engages young scholars in an activity to monitor animal foraging behavior on a spatial scale. The students will break into groups and track each other's movements as they move through a pre-determined course. The results will...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sounds Like Music
Music can loosely be defined as organized sound. The instructional activity objectives, understanding sound is a form of energy, understanding pitch, understanding sound traveling through a medium, and being able to separate music from...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Other Water Cycle
For young scholars that have already been introduced to the water cycle, this lesson is intended as a logical follow-up. Students will learn about human impacts on the water cycle that create a pathway for pollutants beginning with urban...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Do Plants Eat?
Through a teacher-led discussion, students realize that the food energy plants obtain comes from sunlight via the plant process of photosynthesis. They learn what photosynthesis is, at an age-appropriate level of detail and vocabulary,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Generators: Three Mile Island vs. Hoover Dam
Students are given a history of electricity and its development into the modern age lifeline upon which we so depend. The methods of power generation are introduced, and further discussion of each technology's pros and cons follows.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Particle Sensing: The Coulter Counter
Students are presented with a short activity on the Coulter principle, an electronic method to detect microscopic particles and determine their concentration in fluid. Depending on the focus of study, students can investigate the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Physics of Roller Coasters
Learners explore the physics utilized by engineers in designing today's roller coasters, including potential and kinetic energy, friction, and gravity. First, students learn that all true roller coasters are completely driven by the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: From Sunlight to Electric Current
The lesson will first explore the concept of current in electrical circuits. Current will be defined as the flow of electrons. Photovoltaic (PV) cell properties will then be introduced. This will lead to the principle of "Conservation of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Heat From the Sun
In this lesson, students will first discuss where energy comes from, including sources such as fossil fuels, nuclear, and such renewable technologies as solar. After this initial exploration, students will investigate the three main...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who Needs What?
The teacher leads a discussion in which young scholars identify the physical needs of animals, and then speculate on the needs of plants. With guidance from the teacher, the students then help design an experiment that can take place in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Surface Tension Basics
Students are presented with the question: "Why does a liquid jet break up into droplets?" and introduced to its importance in inkjet printers. A discussion of cohesive forces and surface tension is included, as well as surface acting...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Capillarity Measuring Surface Tension
Learners are presented with a short lesson on the difference between cohesive forces (the forces that hold water molecules together and create surface tension) and adhesive forces (the forces that causes water to "stick" to solid...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wetting and Contact Angle
Students are presented with the concepts of wetting and contact angle. They are also introduced to the distinction between hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. Students observe how different surfaces are used to maintain visibility...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Superhydrophobicity: The Lotus Effect
Students are introduced to superhydrophobic surfaces and the "lotus effect." Water spilled on a superhydrophobic surface does not wet the surface, but simply rolls off. Additionally, as water moves across the superhydrophobic surface, it...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Medical Instrumentation
Students will discuss the special considerations that must be made when dealing with the human body, and will gain an appreciation for the amazing devices that have improved our quality of life. They will also explore how 'Form Fits...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Can You Taste It?
Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson plan and activity, students conduct an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Skyscrapers: Engineering Up!
Skyscrapers are one of the most glorified products of Civil Engineering and contain an interesting history of progress and development. In this lesson, the students will learn about the history of the world's tallest free standing...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Viral Hijackers
Students learn how viruses invade host cells and hijack the hosts' cell-reproduction mechanisms in order to make new viruses, which can in turn attack additional host cells. Students also learn how the immune system responds to a viral...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Population Growth in Yeasts
This lesson is the second of two that explore cellular respiration and population growth in yeasts. In the first lesson, students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Complex Networks and Graphs
Students learn about complex networks and how to represent them using graphs. They also learn that graph theory is a useful mathematical tool for studying complex networks in diverse applications of science and engineering, such as...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Processes on Complex Networks
Building on their understanding of graphs, young scholars are introduced to random processes on networks. They walk through an illustrative example to see how a random process can be used to represent the spread of an infectious disease,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Evolution of Digital Organisms
Young scholars are introduced to the concepts of digital organisms and digital evolution. They learn about the research that digital evolution software makes possible, and compare and contrast it with biological evolution.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Introduction to Evolutionary Computation
Students are introduced to the concepts of evolution by natural selection and digital evolution software. They learn about the field of evolutionary computation, which applies the principles of natural selection to solve engineering...