TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Laser Types and Uses
Through two classroom demos, students are introduced to the basic properties of lasers through various mediums. In the Making an Electric Pickle demonstration, students see how cellular tissue is able to conduct electricity, and how this...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Food Packaging
This lesson plan focuses on how food packages are designed and made. Students will learn three of the main functions of a food package. They will learn what is necessary of the design and materials of a package to keep food clean,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Splash, Pop, Fizz: Rube Goldberg Machines
Refreshed with an understanding of the six simple machines; screw, wedge, pully, incline plane, wheel and axle, and lever, student groups receive materials and an allotted amount of time to act as mechanical engineers to design and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Renewable Energy Living Lab
Students become familiar with the online Renewable Energy Living Lab interface and access its real-world solar energy data to evaluate the potential for solar generation in various U.S. locations. They become familiar with where the most...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Washing Air
Students observe and discuss a simple model of a wet scrubber to understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Polluted Air = Polluted Lungs
To gain a better understanding of the roles and functions of components of the human respiratory system and our need for clean air, students construct model lungs that include a diaphragm and chest cavity. They see how air moving in and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design Step 1: Identify the Need
Students practice the initial steps involved in an engineering design challenge. They begin by reviewing the steps of the engineering design loop and discussing the client need for the project. Next, they identify a relevant context,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design Step 2: Research the Problem
Through Internet research, patent research, standards and codes research, user interviews (if possible) and other techniques (idea web, reverse engineering), students further develop the context for their design challenge. In subsequent...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dam Pass or Fail
Students conduct Internet research to investigate the purpose and current functioning status of some of the largest dams throughout the world. They investigate the success or failure of eight dams and complete a worksheet. While...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bulbs & Batteries Side by Side
We are surrounded everyday by circuits that utilize "in parallel" and "in series" circuitry. Complicated circuits designed by engineers are made of many simpler parallel and series circuits. In this hands-on activity, students build...
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: 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: Creepy Silly Putty
Students learn about viscoelastic material behavior, such as strain rate dependence and creep, by using silly putty, an easy-to-make polymer material. They learn how to make silly putty, observe its behavior with different strain rates,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Artificial Heart Design Challenge
Students are presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they are biomedical engineers asked to design artificial hearts. Using the engineering design process as a guide, the challenge is established and students brainstorm to list...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Deformation: Nanocomposite Compression
Students learn about nanocomposites, compression and strain as they design and program robots that compress materials. Student groups conduct experiments to determine how many LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT motor rotations it takes to compress soft...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trebuchet Launch
Students work as engineers to design and test trebuchets (in this case LEGO MINDSTORMS robots) that can launch objects. During the testing stage, they change one variable at a time to study its effect on the outcome of their designs....