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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Android App Development

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Exploring Acceleration With an Android

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Flow Charting App Inventor Tutorials

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Graphing the Spread of Disease

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Mars Rover App Creation

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Java Programming of Ocr

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Student groups use the Java programming language to implement the algorithms for optical character recognition (OCR) that they developed in the associated lesson. The ultimate goal is to produce computer code that recognizes a digit on a...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Graphing Your Social Network

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Trigonometry via Mobile Device

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students investigate the relationships between angles and side lengths in right triangles with the help of materials found in the classroom and a mobile device.
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Testing With J Unit

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: An Implementation of Steganography

For Teachers 9th - 10th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Python Script Analysis

For Teachers 11th - 12th
Working in small groups, students complete and run functioning Python codes.This requires students to understand the logic employed, and then they must make modifications to the code in order to find the slopes of tangents to a variety...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Estimating the Storage Capacity of a Cd/dvd

For Teachers 11th - 12th
Students estimate the storage capacity of CDs and DVDs by assessing diffraction patterns of green and red laser beams.
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Who Can Make the Best Coordinate System?

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: What's Wrong With the Coordinates at the North Pole?

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Get the Word Out at Mc Donalds!

For Teachers 7th - 9th Standards
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Searching for Bigfoot and Others Like Him

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Where Are the Plastics Near Me? (Field Trip)

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Where Are the Plastics Near Me? (Mapping the Data)

For Teachers 7th - 9th
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...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Inside the Dna

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students conduct their own research to discover and understand the methods designed by engineers and used by scientists to analyze or validate the molecular structure of DNA, proteins and enzymes, as well as basic information about gel...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Dna Forensics and Color Pigments

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students perform DNA forensics using food coloring to enhance their understanding of DNA fingerprinting, restriction enzymes, genotyping and DNA gel electrophoresis. They place small drops of different food coloring ("water-based paint")...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Would You Drink That?

For Teachers 9th - 10th
This activity focuses on getting students to think about bacteria, water quality and water treatment processes. Students develop and test their hypotheses about the "cleanliness" of three water samples prepared by the teacher. Then they...
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Lesson Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Should I Drink That?

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students perform the first steps that environmental engineers do to determine water quality - sampling and analysis. Student teams measure the electrical conductivity of four water samples using teacher-made LED conductivity testers and...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Keep It Moving! From Electrons to Electric Motors

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students act as engineers to apply what they know about how circuits work in electrical/motorized devices to design their own battery-operated model motor vehicles with specific paramaters. They calculate the work done by the vehicles...
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Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Cartesian Diver

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students observe Pascal's law, Archimedes' principle, and the ideal gas law as a Cartesian diver moves within a closed system.