TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Oil Spill Cleanup
This hands-on experiment will provide students with an understanding of the issues that surround environmental cleanup. Students will create their own oil spill, try different methods for cleaning it up, and then discuss the merits of...
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: Groundwater Detectives
Student teams locate a contaminant spill in a hypothetical site by measuring the pH of soil samples. Then they predict the direction of groundwater flow using mathematical modeling. They also use the engineering design process to come up...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design, Build and Test Your Own Landfill
Students design and build model landfills using materials similar to those used by engineers for full-scale landfills. Their completed small-size landfills are "rained" on and subjected to other erosion processes. The goal is to create...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Cleaning the Air
Engineers design methods of removing particulate matter from industrial sources to minimize negative effects of air pollution. In this activity, students will undertake a similar engineering challenge as they design and build a filter to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Environmental Interactions
In this activity, students create a "web" to identify and demonstrate the interactions among the living and non-living parts of an environment. This information allows students to better understand what an environment is and to also...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: This Landfill Is a Gas!
In this activity, students work as engineers to build and observe a model landfill. They will understand the process and pitfalls of the use of landfills as a method for the waste disposal.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: It's All in the Package
In this activity, students explore the concept of "reducing" solid waste and how it relates to product packaging and engineering advancements in packaging materials. Students read about and evaluate the highly publicized packaging...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Recycled Towers
Students learn about material reuse by designing and building the strongest and tallest towers they can, using only recycled materials. They follow design constraints and build their towers to withstand earthquake and high wind simulations.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Gotten Into You?
In this activity, students use models to investigate the process and consequences of water contamination on the land, groundwater, and plants. This is a good introduction to building water filters found in the associated activity, The...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Dirty Water Project
In this activity, students investigate different methods (aeration and filtering) for removing pollutants from water. They will design and build their own water filters.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land
In this activity, students will review and evaluate the ways land is covered and used in their local community. They will also consider the environmental effects of the different types of land use. Students will act as community planning...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Solar Power
In this activity, students learn how engineers use solar energy to heat buildings by investigating the thermal storage properties of some common materials: sand, salt, water and shredded paper. Students then evaluate the usefulness of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Fancy Feet
Students use the engineering design process to solve a real-world problem - shoe engineering! Working in small teams, students design, build and test a pair of wearable platform or high-heeled shoes, taking into consideration the stress...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flying T Shirts
During this engineering design/build project, students investigate many different solutions to a problem. Their design challenge is to find a way to get school t-shirts up into the stands during home sporting events. They follow the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Distorted Disturbances
Students pass around and distort messages written on index cards to learn how we use signals from GPS occultations to study the atmosphere. The cards represent information sent from GPS satellites being distorted as they pass through...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Gravity Fed Water System for Developing Communities
Students learn about water poverty and how water engineers can develop appropriate solutions to a problem that is plaguing nearly a sixth of the world's population. Students follow the engineering design process to design a gravity-fed...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Saving a Life: Heart Valve Replacement
Students use their knowledge about how healthy heart valves function to design, construct and implant prototype replacement mitral valves for hypothetical patients' hearts. Building on what they learned in the associated lesson about...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Counting Calories
The students discover the basics of heat transfer in this activity by constructing a constant pressure calorimeter to determine the heat of solution of potassium chloride in water. They first predict the amount of heat consumed by the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hot Potato, Cool Foil
Students explore material properties by applying some basic principles of heat transfer. They use calorimeters to determine the specific heat of three substances: aluminum, copper and another of their choice. Each substance is cooled in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Solar Water Heater
Student teams design and build solar water heating devices that mimic those used in residences to capture energy in the form of solar radiation and convert it to thermal energy. This thermal energy is next transferred to water (to be...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Swamp Cooler
Using a household fan, cardboard box and paper towels, student teams design and build an evaporative cooler (swamp cooler). They learn about the process that cools water during the evaporation of water. They make calculations to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Thermostat
Students investigate circuits and their components by building a basic thermostat. They learn why key parts are necessary for the circuit to function, and alter the circuit to optimize the thermostat temperature range. They also gain an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Model Greenhouses
Students learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the greenhouse effect. They construct their own miniature greenhouses and explore how their designs take advantage of heat transfer processes to create controlled environments....