TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Earth Impact
This activity poses the question: What would happen if a meteor or comet impacted Earth? Students simulate an impact in a container of sand using various-sized rocks, all while measuring, recording and graphing results and conclusions....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Building a Fancy Spectrograph
Students create and decorate their own spectrographs using simple materials and holographic diffraction gratings. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual components of light. After building the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Your Own Spectrograph
Students use simple materials to design an open spectrograph so they can calculate the angle light is bent when it passes through a holographic diffraction grating. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Spectroscopy Mission
Students find and calculate the angle that light is transmitted through a holographic diffraction grating using trigonometry. After finding this angle, student teams design and build their own spectrographs, researching and designing a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sum It Up: An Introduction to Static Equilibrium
Students are introduced to static equilibrium by learning how forces and torques are balanced in a well-designed engineering structure. A tower crane is presented as a simplified two-dimensional case. Using Popsicle sticks and hot glue,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: It Burns!
In this activity, students learn how to prevent exposure to the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Students will systematically test various sunscreens to determine the relationship between spf (sun protection factor) value and sun...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Challenges of Laparoscopic Surgery
Students teams use a laparoscopic surgical trainer to perform simple laparoscopic surgery tasks (dissections, sutures) using laparoscopic tools. Just like in the operating room, where the purpose is to perform surgery carefully and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Designing a Robotic Surgical Device
Student teams create laparoscopic surgical robots designed to reduce the invasiveness of diagnosing endometriosis and investigate how the disease forms and spreads. Using a synthetic abdominal cavity simulator, students test and iterate...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Hooke's Law to Understand Materials
Students explore the response of springs to forces as a way to begin to understand elastic solid behavior. They gain experience in data collection, spring constant calculation, and comparison and interpretation of graphs and material...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Measuring Viscosity
Students calculate the viscosity of various household fluids by measuring the amount of time it takes marble or steel balls to fall given distances through the liquids. They experience what viscosity means, and also practice using...
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: Preconditioning Balloons
Students use balloons (a polymer) to explore preconditioning a viscoelastic material behavior that is important to understand when designing biomedical devices. They improve their understanding of preconditioning by measuring the force...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Temperature Tells All!
Students are introduced to the health risks caused by cooking and heating with inefficient cook stoves inside homes, a common practice in rural developing communities. Students simulate the cook stove scenario and use the engineering...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Tower O' Power
In this activity, students learn about creating a design directly from a CAD (computer-aided design) program. They will design a tower in CAD and manufacture the parts with a laser cutter. A competition determines the tower design with...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Truss Destruction
Students work within constraints to construct model trusses and then test them to failure as a way to evaluate the relative strength of different truss configurations and construction styles. Each student group uses Popsicle sticks and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Viking Ship Design Challenge
In this design challenge, students learn about the Vikings from an engineering point-of-view. While investigating the history and anatomy of Viking ships, they learn how engineering solutions are shaped by the surrounding environment and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Save a Life, Clean Some Water!
Student teams practice water quality analysis through turbidity measurement and coliform bacteria counts. They use information about water treatment processes to design prototype small-scale water treatment systems and test the influent...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flood Analysis
Students learn how to use and graph real-world stream gage data to create hydrographs and calculate flood frequency statistics. They also learn how hydrographs help engineers make decisions and recommendations to community stakeholders...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Building a Barometer
Students investigate the weather from a systems approach, learning how individual parts of a system work together to create a final product. Students learn how a barometer works to measure the Earth's air pressure by building a model out...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Weather Alert
Students discuss the characteristics of storms, including the relationship of weather fronts and storms. Using simple materials, the students develop a model of a simple lightning detection system and analyze their model to determine its...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Backyard Weather Station
In this hands-on activity, students use their senses to describe what the weather is doing and to predict what it might do next. After gaining a basic understanding of weather patterns, students will become state park engineers and build...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Protecting Our City With Levees
Students design and build their own model levees. Acting as engineers for their city, teams create sturdy barriers to prevent water from flooding a city in the event of a hurricane.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trash to Treasure!
Student teams use the engineering design process to create a useful product of their choice out of recyclable items and "trash." The class is given a "landfill" of reusable items, such as aluminum cans, cardboard, paper, juice boxes,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Design a Net Zero Energy Classroom
Students create a concept design of their very own net-zero energy classroom by pasting renewable energy and energy-efficiency items into and around a pretend classroom on a sheet of paper. They learn how these items (such as solar...