TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Am I on the Radio?
During this activity, students create a working radio by soldering circuit components supplied from an AM radio kit. Since this activity is carried out in conjunction with the associated lessons concerning circuits and how an AM radio...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor?
In the first part of the activity, each student chews a piece of gum until it loses its flavor, and then leaves the gum to dry for several days before weighing it to determine the amount of mass lost. This mass corresponds to the amount...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bombs Away!
In this hands-on activity students learn create a device to protect a dropped egg and deliver it close to a target. Students learn about engineering as well as potential and kinetic energy and energy transfer
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Fast Can a Carrot Rot?
Students conduct experiments to determine what environmental factors favor decomposition by soil microbes. They use chunks of carrots for the materials to be decomposed, and their experiments are carried out in plastic bags filled with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Determining Densities
Students will use two different methods to determine the densities of a variety of materials and objects. The first method involves direct measurement of the volumes of objects that have simple geometric shapes, while the second uses the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Place in Space
The students will use a "real" 3D coordinate system. They will have 3 axes at right angles, and a plane (the XY plane) that will be able to slide up and down the Z axis. The students will then be given several coordinates and asked to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cereal Magnets
In this activity, students will design a process that removes the most iron from the cereal. This activity is meant for the students to experiment with different materials using what they know about iron, magnets, and forces to design...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sliding and Stuttering
Students use a spring scale to drag an object such as a ceramic coffee cup along a table top or the floor. The spring scale allows them to measure the frictional force that exists between the moving cup and the surface it slides on. By...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does Weight 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 weight added incrementally to an object affects the amount of friction...
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: The Puck Stops Here
After learning about transfer of energy, specifically the loss of kinetic energy to friction, students get a chance to test friction. In groups they are given a wooden block, different fabrics, and weights and asked to design the "best"...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Strum Along
Music and sound are two different concepts that share much in common. Determining the difference between the two can sometimes be difficult due to the subjective nature of deciding what is or is not music. The goal of this activity is to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Simple Coulter Counter
Students build and use a very basic Coulter electric sensing zone particle counter to count an unknown number of particles in a sample of "paint" to determine if enough particles per ml of paint exist to meet a quality standard. In a lab...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cooking With the Sun Creating a Solar Oven
For this activity, students will be given a set of materials: cardboard, a set of insulating materials (i.e. foam, newspaper, etc.), aluminum foil, and Plexiglas. Students will then become engineers in building a solar oven from the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Surface Tension Lab
Students extend their understanding of surface tension by exploring the real-world engineering problem of deciding what makes a "good" soap bubble. Student teams first measure this property, and then use this measurement to determine the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Exploring Capillary Action
Students observe multiple examples of capillary action. First they observe the shape of a glass-water meniscus and explain its shape in terms of the adhesive attraction of the water to the glass. Then they study capillary tubes and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Measuring Surface Tension
Students observe capillary action in glass tubes of varying sizes. Then they use the capillary action to calculate the surface tension in each tube. They find the average surface tensions and calculate the statistical errors.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Investigating Contact Angle
Students observe how water acts differently when placed on hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. They determine which coatings are best to cause surfaces to shed water quickly or reduce the "fogging" caused by condensation.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Exploring the Lotus Effect
Students test and observe the "self-cleaning" lotus effect using a lotus leaf and cloth treated with a synthetic lotus-like superhydrophobic coating. They also observe the Wenzel and Cassie Baxter wetting states by creating and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Growing and Graphing
Students visit a 2nd and a 4th grade class to measure the heights of older students using large building blocks as a non-standard unit of measure. They can also measure adults in the school community. Results are displayed in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Tasty Experiment
Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Start Networking!
To get a better understanding of complex networks, students create their own, real social network example by interacting with their peers in the classroom and documenting the interactions. They represent the interaction data as a graph,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Curb the Epidemic!
Using a website simulation tool, students build on their understanding of random processes on networks to interact with the graph of a social network of individuals and simulate the spread of a disease. They decide which two individuals...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Pingus Penguins: Writing Good Instructions
Students use the free computer game Pingus to learn how engineers, specifically environmental engineers, use their technical writing skills to give instructions and follow the instructions of others. Students learn to write instructions...