TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Do You See What I See?
Students research OCR and OCR techniques and then apply those methods to the design challenge by developing algorithms capable of correctly reading a number on a typical high school sports scoreboard.
TryEngineering
Try Engineering: Biomimicry in Engineering
This lesson focuses on the concept of Biomimicry and learners learn how engineers have incorporated structures and methods from the living world in products and solutions for all industries. Students then work in teams to develop a...
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: Oil on the Ocean
Students learn about oil spills and their environmental and economic effects. They experience the steps of the engineering design process as they brainstorm potential methods for oil spill clean-up, and then design, build, and re-design...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Exploring Solar Power
This unit provides students the opportunity to explore methods engineers have devised for harnessing sunlight to generate power. Students will initially explore heat transfer and heat storage through the construction, testing, and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Landfills: Building Them Better
Waste disposal has been an ongoing problem since medieval times. Environmental engineers are employed to develop technologies to dispose of the enormous amount of trash produced in the United States. In this lesson, students will learn...
Smithsonian Institution
National Air and Space Museum: Wright Brothers: Engineering the Wright Way
Great interactive provides students with an opportunity to use engineering skills to design and test airplane wings based on the methods of the Wright brothers. Step into the workshop and design a set of wings that will fly your glider...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Penny Perfect Properties (Solid Liquid Interactions)
Students investigate the property dependence between liquid and solid interfaces and determine observable differences in how liquids react to different solid surfaces. They compare copper pennies and plastic "coins" as the two test...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Daylighting Design
Students explore the many different ways that engineers provide natural lighting to interior spaces. They analyze various methods of daylighting by constructing model houses from foam core board and simulating the sun with a desk lamp....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Clean Up This Mess
Students are challenged to design a method for separating steel from aluminum based on magnetic properties as is frequently done in recycling operations. To complicate the challenge, the magnet used to separate the steel must be able to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Air Pollution
Students are introduced to the concept of air quality by investigating the composition, properties, atmospheric layers and everyday importance of air. They explore the sources and effects of visible and invisible air pollution. By...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Heave Ho!
Students will discover the scientific basis for the use of inclined planes. They will explore, using a spring scale, a bag of rocks and an inclined plane, how dragging objects up a slope is easier than lifting them straight up into the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Earthquakes Rock!
Students learn the two main methods to measure earthquakes, the Richter Scale and the Mercalli Scale. They make a model of a seismograph - a measuring device that records an earthquake on a seismogram. Students also investigate which...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Better by Design
The purpose of this activity is to use a scientific method to determine the effect of control surfaces on a paper glider. The students will construct a paper airplane/glider and test its performance to determine the base characteristics...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Are You in Control?
This lesson teaches the engineering method for testing wherein one variable is changed while the others are held constant. Young scholars compare the performance of a single paper airplane design while changing the shape, size and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Let's Move It!
Students explore methods employing simple machines likely used in ancient pyramid building, as well as common modern-day material transportation. They learn about the wheel and axle as a means to transport materials from rock quarry to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: All Caught Up
Commercial fishing nets often trap unprofitable animals in the process of catching their target species. In the following activity, students will experience the difficulty that fishermen experience while trying to isolate a target...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Contact Area Matter?
Using the same method for measuring friction that was used in the previous lesson (Discovering Friction), students design and conduct an experiment to determine if the amount of area over which an object contacts a surface it is moving...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Environment
Through 10 lessons and more than 20 hands-on activities, students are introduced to the concept of an environment and the many interactions within it. As they learn about natural and human-made environments, as well as renewable and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sugar Spill!
In this activity, students act as environmental engineers involved with the clean up of a toxic spill. Using bioremediation as the process, students select which bacteria they will use to eat up the pollutant spilled. Students learn how...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using J Unit
Students focus on the testing phase of the design process by considering how they have tested computer programs in the past and learning about a new method called JUnit to test programs in the future. JUnit is a testing method that is...
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: Feel Better Faster: All About Flow Rate
All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dams
Through eight lessons, students are introduced to many facets of dams, including their basic components, the common types (all designed to resist strong forces), their primary benefits (electricity generation, water supply, flood...