TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Power Your House With Water
Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Students work through the engineering design process to build...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Zero Energy Housing
Students investigate passive solar building design with a focus solely on heating. They learn how insulation, window placement, thermal mass, surface colors, and site orientation play important roles in passive solar heating. They use...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Lunch in Outer Space!
Students learn about the unique challenges astronauts face while eating in outer space. They explore different food choices and food packaging. Students learn about the engineering design process, and then, as NASA engineering teams,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Kidney Filtering
In this activity, students filter different substances through a plastic window screen, different sized hardware cloth and poultry netting. Their model shows how the thickness of a filter in the kidney is imperative in deciding what will...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Shades of Gray(water)
Students are introduced to the concepts of graywater and water reuse within households. They calculate the amount of used water a family generates in one day and use a model of home plumbing to find out how much graywater is produced in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: For Those Back Home
Students review information learned during the past five lessons and activities of the Introduction to Engineering unit. Working in teams, they create flyers and short quizzes about various types of engineering to share with the class...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Corn for Fuel?!
In this activity, students examine how to grow plants the most efficiently. They imagine that they are designing a biofuels production facility and need to know how to efficiently grow plants to use in this facility. As a means of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: News Flash!
This activity illustrates the interrelationship between science and engineering in the context of extinction prevention. There are two parts to the activity. The first part challenges students to think like scientists as they generate...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Live Like an Animal
In this activity, students design an innovative human shelter that is inspired and informed by an animal structure. Each group is assigned an animal class, and they gather information about shelters used by the animals in that class....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design Inspired by Nature
Students discover how engineers can use biomimicry to enhance their designs. They learn how careful observation of nature can lead to new innovations and products. In this activity, students reverse engineer a flower to glean design...
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: Beating the Motion Sensor
Lighting is responsible for nearly one-third of the electricity use in buildings. One of the best ways to conserve energy is to make sure the lights are turned off when no one is in a room. This process can be automated using motion...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineers Speak for the Trees
Students begin by reading Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" as an example of how overdevelopment can cause long-lasting environmental destruction. Students discuss how to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of human industry....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: An Inflated Impression of Mars
The purpose of this activity is to use scaling in order to give students an idea of the size of Mars in relation to the Earth and the Moon as well as the distance between them. The students will have to calculate dimensions of the scaled...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Strong Arm Tactics
Students generally do not know the complexity that goes into building and programming a robotic arm. In actuality, creating such an arm comes from a design that involves mechanical, electrical, and computer science engineers. This...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Edible Rovers
Students act as Mars exploratory rover engineers. They evaluate rover equipment options and determine what parts fit in a provided NASA budget. With a given parts list, teams use these constraints to design for their rover. The students...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Are We Alone?
The year is 2032 and your class has successfully achieved a manned mission to Mars! After several explorations of the Red Planet, one question is still being debated: "Is there life on Mars?" The class is challenged with the task of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: In and Out Reactor
Students learn about material balances, a fundamental concept of chemical engineering. They use stoichiometry to predict the mass of carbon dioxide that escapes after reacting measured quantities of sodium bicarbonate with dilute acetic...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Give an Inch, Take a Foot
Students practice measuring techniques by measuring different objects and distances around the classroom. They practice using different scales of measurement in metric units and estimation. Also, students learn how measurement is used in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Mint Mobiles
Students design, build and test model race cars made from simple materials (lifesaver-shaped candies, plastic drinking straws, Popsicle sticks, index cards, tape) as a way to explore independent, dependent and control variables. They...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Riding the Gravity Wave
Students write a biographical sketch of an artist or athlete who lives on the edge, riding the gravity wave, to better understand how these artists and athletes work with gravity and manage risk. Note: The literacy activities for the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Big Mo
Momentum is not only a physical principle; it is a psychological phenomenon. Students learn how the "Big Mo" of the bandwagon effect contributes to the development of fads and manias, and how modern technology and mass media accelerate...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Action Reaction! Rocket
Students construct a rocket from a balloon propelled along a guide string. They use this model to learn about Newton's three laws of motion, examining the effect of different forces on the motion of the rocket.
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Teach Engineering: Couch Potato or Inertia Victim?
Students design a simple behavioral survey, and learn basic protocol for primary research, survey design and report writing. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to...