TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Portable Sundial
In this activity students will investigate the accuracy of sundials and the discrepancy that lies between "real time" and "clock time". They will track the position of the sun over the course of a relatively short period of time as they...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Rolling Blackouts & Environmental Impact
The goal is for the students to understand the environmental design considerations required when generating electricity. The electric power that we use every day at home and work is generated by a variety of power plants. Power plants...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Smart Move!
This is a simple activity to visualize a communication system. In order to do this the students encode, decode, transmit, receive, and store messages. They will use a code sheet and flashlight for this process. They will also maintain a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Stop the Stretching
Students will learn about composite materials, tension as a force and how they act on structural components through the design and testing of a strip of plastic chair webbing.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is the Best Insulator: Air, Styrofoam, Foil, or Cotton?
That heat flows from hot to cold is an unfortunate truth of life. People have put a lot of effort into stopping this fact, however all they have been able to do is slow the process. Working in groups of three to four, students will...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wimpy Radar Antenna
Students will reinforce an antenna tower made from foam insulation, so that it will withstand a 480 N-cm bending moment (torque) and a 280 N-cm twisting moment (torque) with minimal deflection. One class will be used to discuss the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Asteroid Impact
Asteroid Impact is an 8-10 class long (350-450 min) earth science curricular unit where student teams are posed with the scenario that an asteroid will impact earth. They must design the location and size of underground caverns to save...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is a Computer Program?
Through four lesson and four activities, students are introduced to the logic behind programming using LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Growling Stomach
In this lesson, the students will investigate what types of plants and insects they could eat to survive in the Amazon. They will research various plants and/or insects and identify characteristics that make them edible or useful for the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Evening News
For this lesson, the students will summarize their experiences in the Amazon rainforest by developing and presenting a briefing for a T.V. evening news program.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Homeward Bound
Students review the what they have learned throughout the five lessons in this unit. This includes a review of many types of engineers, reminding students of the various everyday products, structures and processes they design and create...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Science of Swinging
Young scholars learn what a pendulum is and how it works in the context of amusement park rides. While exploring the physics of pendulums, they are also introduced to Newton's first law of motion - about continuous motion and inertia.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Just Plane Simple
This lesson introduces young scholars to three of the six simple machines used by many engineers. These machines include the inclined plane, the wedge and the screw. In general, engineers use the inclined plane to lift heavy loads, the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Levers That Lift
This lesson introduces students to three of the six simple machines used by many engineers: the lever, the pulley, and the wheel-and-axle. In general, engineers use the lever to magnify the force applied to an object, the pulley to lift...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Not So Simple
Students expand upon their understanding of simple machines with an introduction to compound machines. A compound machine - a combination of two or more simple machines - can affect work more than its individual components. Engineers who...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Making Music
In this lesson, young scholars learn about sound. Girls and boys are introduced to the concept of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: To Absorb or Reflect, That Is the Question
This is the last of five sound lessons, and it introduces acoustics as the science of studying and controlling sound. Students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Pictures Please: Traveling Light
In this activity, students learn that light travels in a straight line from a light source and that ray diagrams help us understand how an image will be created by a lens. In the accompanying activity, students explore the concepts...
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 instructional activity, students learn basic concepts of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Do Bread and Beer Have in Common?
Students 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 students. 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...