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.
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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
In 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.
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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
Students 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 students 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 wedge...
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, students 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. Young scholars learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Pictures Please: Traveling Light
In this lesson, learners 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 behind...
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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...
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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...
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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?
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 young scholars. When there is mechanical energy involved, something moves. Mechanical energy is a very important concept to understand. Engineers need to know what...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dirty Decomposers
Young scholars 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...
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Teach Engineering: Floaters and Sinkers
This lesson introduces students 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. Students devise methods to determine...
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Teach Engineering: Electrifying the World
This lesson 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 lesson also includes...