TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Tissue Mechanics
Students reflect on their experiences making silly putty (the previous hands-on activity in the unit), especially why changing the borax concentration alters the mechanical properties of silly putty and how this pertains to tissue...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Triangles & Trusses
Students learn about the fundamental strength of different shapes, illustrating why structural engineers continue to use the triangle as the structural shape of choice. Examples from everyday life are introduced to show how this shape is...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Test and Treat Before You Drink
Students learn about water quality testing and basic water treatment processes and technology options. Biological, physical and chemical treatment processes are addressed, as well as physical and biological water quality testing,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Watershed Balance
This lesson teaches the concept of a watershed and why it is important in the context of engineering hydrology. Learners learn about runoff and how we visualize runoff in the form of hydrographs.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hurricanes
Students learn what causes hurricanes and what engineers do to help protect people from destruction caused by hurricane winds and rain. Research and data collection vessels allow for scientists and engineers to model and predict weather...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Global Climate Change
Learners learn how the greenhouse effect is related to global warming and how global warming impacts our planet, including global climate change. Extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and how we react to these changes are the main...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Kind of Footprint? Carbon Footprint
Young scholars determine their carbon footprints by answering questions about their everyday lifestyle choices. Then they engineer plans to reduce them. Students learn about their personal impacts on global climate change and how they...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Boxed in and Wrapped Up
Students find the volume and surface area of a rectangular box (e.g., a cereal box), and then figure out how to convert that box into a new, cubical box having the same volume as the original. As they construct the new, cube-shaped box...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Caught in the Net
Bycatch can be defined as the act of unintentionally catching certain living creatures using fishing gear. A bycatched species is distinguished from a target species (the animal the gear is intended to catch) because it is not sold or...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sound for Sight
Echolocation is the ability to orient by transmitting sound and receiving echoes from objects in the environment. As a result of a Marco-Polo type activity and subsequent lesson, students learn basic concepts of echolocation. They use...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Do Bread and Beer Have in Common?
Learners are presented with information that will allow them to recognize that yeasts are unicellular organisms that are useful to humans. In fact, their usefulness is derived from the contrast between the way yeast cells and human cells...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Move It!
Mechanical energy is the most easily understood form of energy for learners. When there is mechanical energy involved, something moves. Mechanical energy is a very important concept to understand. Engineers need to know what happens when...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dirty Decomposers
Students design and 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...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Floaters and Sinkers
This lesson introduces young scholars to the important concept of density. The focus is on the more easily understood densities of solids, but students can also explore the densities of liquids and gases. Young scholars devise methods to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Many Drops?
In this lesson and its associated activity, students conduct a simple test to determine how many drops of each of three liquids can be placed on a penny before spilling over. The three liquids are water, rubbing alcohol, and vegetable...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Electrifying the World
This instructional activity introduces students to the fundamental concepts of electricity. This is accomplished by addressing questions such as "How is electricity generated," and "How is it used in every-day life?" The instructional...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Energy Transfer in Musical Instruments
This lesson plan covers concepts of energy and energy transfer utilizing energy transfer in musical instruments as an example. More specifically, the lesson plan explains the two different ways in which energy can be transferred between...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Mice Rule! (Or Not)
Students explore the relationships between genetics, biodiversity, and evolution through a simple activity involving hypothetical wild mouse populations. First, students toss coins to determine what traits a set of mouse parents...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Floats Your Boat?
Students use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Fortified Breakfast
In this lesson, students will learn that minerals are a necessary part of our diet. They will learn that different minerals have different functions in the body. More specifically, they will discover that iron is necessary to carry...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Discovering Friction
With a simple demonstration activity, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Then, in the Associated Activity (Sliding and Stuttering), they work in teams to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Factors Affecting Friction
In this lesson, learners use previous knowledge about friction to formulate hypotheses concerning the effects of weight and contact area on the amount of friction between two surfaces. In the Associated Activities (Does Weight Matter?...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Dominant?
In a class discussion format, the teacher presents background information about basic human genetics. The number of chromosomes in both body cells and egg and sperm cells is covered, as well as the concept of dominant and recessive...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Put Your Heart Into Engineering
This lesson plan contains background about the blood vascular system and the heart. Also, the different sizes of capillaries, veins, and arteries, and how they affect blood flow through the system. We will then proceed to talk about the...