TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is a Robot?
This lesson introduces students to the major characteristics of robots. The associated activity uses the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT system as an example. Before studying robots in more detail, it is important for students to consider the many...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Does a Robot Work?
This instructional activity introduces electricity, batteries and motors using a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot. The associated activity guides students to build a simple LEGO NXT set-up and see the practical implementation of the concepts...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Do Human Sensors Work?
This lesson highlights the similarities between human sensors and their engineering counterparts. Taking this approach enables students to view the human body as a system, that is, from the perspective of an engineer. Humans have...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is a Sensor?
Students gain a rigorous background in the primary human sensors, as preparation for comparing them to some electronic equivalents in the associated activity.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is a Motor? How Does a Rotation Sensor Work?
Students learn about electric motors and rotational sensors. They create a basic program using the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT interface to control a motor to move a small robot.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Does a Touch Sensor Work?
Students look at human senses and their electronic imitators, with special focus on the skin and touch sensors. They have a chance to handle and get familiar with the LEGO touch sensor, including programming LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Does a Sound Sensor Work?
Students learn about how sound sensors work, reinforcing their similarities to the human sense of hearing. This lesson and its associated activity enable students to appreciate how robots can take sensor input and use it to make...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Does a Light Sensor Work?
A mini-activity, which uses LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT intelligent bricks and light sensors gives students a chance to investigate how light sensors function in preparation for the associated activity involving the light sensors and taskbots.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Storing Android Accelerometer Data: App Design
Learners work through an online tutorial on MIT's App Inventor to learn how to create Android applications. Using those skills, they create their own applications and use them to collect data from an Android device accelerometer and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Android Acceleration
Students prepare for the associated activity in which they investigate acceleration by collecting acceleration vs. time data using the accelerometer of a sliding Android device. Based on the experimental set-up for the activity, students...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Program Analysis Using App Inventor
In computer science, program analysis is used to determine the behavior of computer programs. Flow charts are an important tool for understanding how programs work by tracing control flow. Control flow is a graphical representation of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Passing the Bug
Young scholars apply concepts of disease transmission to analyze infection data, either provided or created using Bluetooth-enabled Android devices. This data collection may include several cases, such as small static groups...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Making the Connection
Graph theory is a visual way to represent relationships between objects. One of the simplest uses of graph theory is a family tree that shows how different people are related. Another application is social networks like Facebook, where a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Curiosity Killed the App
Students gain experience with the software/system design process, closely related to the engineering design process, to solve a problem. First, they learn about the Mars Curiosity rover and its mission, including the difficulties that...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Does It Work? Test and Test Again
Testing is critical to any design, whether it be in the creation of new software or building a bridge across a wide river. Despite risking the quality of the design, the testing stage is often hurried in order to get products to market....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Do You See What I See?
Students research OCR and OCR techniques and then apply those methods to the design challenge by developing algorithms capable of correctly reading a number on a typical high school sports scoreboard.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graph Theory in Drama
Students use graph theory to create social graphs for their own social networks and apply what learn to create a graph representing the social dynamics found in a dramatic text. Students then derive meaning based on what they know about...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Handheld Trigonometry
In addition to understanding the concept of similar right triangles and how they apply to trigonometric ratios, students explore a clinometer app, and discover how it can be used to test the mathematics underpinning trigonometry.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using J Unit
Students focus on the testing phase of the design process by considering how they have tested computer programs in the past and learning about a new method called JUnit to test programs in the future. JUnit is a testing method that is...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Python Calculus
Learners analyze a cartoon of a Rube Goldberg machine and a Python programming language script to practice engineering analysis. This exercise enables students to see the parallels between a more traditional mechanical engineering design...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Antimatter Matters
Antimatter, the charge reversed equivalent of matter, has captured the imaginations of science fiction fans for years as a perfectly efficient form of energy. While normal matter consists of atoms with negatively charged electrons...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is Gis?
Geographic information systems (GIS) are important technology that allows rapid study and use of spatial information. GIS have become increasingly prevalent in industry and the consumer/internet world in the last 20 years. Historically,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Projections and Coordinates: Turning a 3 D Earth Into Flatlands
Projections and coordinates are key advancements in the geographic sciences that allow us to better understand the nature of the Earth and how to describe location. These innovations in describing the Earth are the basis for everything...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is an interesting and somewhat publicized environmental problem. A swirling soup of trash up to 10 meters deep and just below the water surface is composed mainly of non-degradable plastics. These...