Updating search results...

Search Resources

1727 Results

View
Selected filters:
  • TeachEngineering
Build the Biggest Box
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Student pairs are given 10 minutes to create the biggest box possible using one piece of construction paper. Teams use only scissors and tape to each construct a box and determine how much puffed rice it can hold. Then, to meet the challenge, they improve their designs to create bigger boxes. They plot the class data, comparing measured to calculated volumes for each box, seeing the mathematical relationship. They discuss how the concepts of volume and design iteration are important for engineers. Making 3-D shapes also supports the development of spatial visualization skills. This activity and its associated lesson and activity all employ volume and geometry to cultivate seeing patterns and understanding scale models, practices used in engineering design to analyze the effectiveness of proposed design solutions.

Subject:
Geometry
Mathematics
Measurement and Data
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Aaron Lamplugh
Maia Vadeen
Malinda Zarske
Nathan Coyle
Russell Anderson
Ryan Sullivan
Date Added:
07/07/2021
Bulbs & Batteries Side by Side
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

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 parallel circuits, exploring how they function and their unique features.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Daria Kotys-Schwartz
Denise W. Carlson
Joe Friedrichsen
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Sabre Duren
Xochitl Zamora Thompson
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Bulbs & Batteries in a Row
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Everyday we are surrounded by circuits that use "in parallel" and "in series" circuitry. Complicated circuits designed by engineers are composed of many simpler parallel and series circuits. During this activity, students build a simple series circuit and discover the properties associated with series circuits.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Daria Kotys-Schwartz
Denise Carlson
Joe Friedrichsen
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Sabre Duren
Xochitl Zamora Thompson
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Bumps and Bruises
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Athletes often wear protective gear to keep themselves safe in contact sports. In this spirit, students follow the steps of engineering design process as they design, build and test protective padding for an egg drop. Many of the design considerations surrounding egg drops are similar to sports equipment design. Watching the transformation of energy from potential to kinetic, observing the impact and working under material constraints introduces students to "sports engineering" and gives them a chance to experience some of the challenges engineers face in designing equipment to protect athletes.

Subject:
Applied Science
Architecture and Design
Engineering
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Abigail Watrous
Connor Lowrey
Denali Lander
Janet Yowell
Katherine Beggs
Melissa Straten
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Buoyant Boats
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students conduct a simple experiment to see how the water level changes in a beaker when a lump of clay sinks in the water and when the same lump of clay is shaped into a bowl that floats in the water. They notice that the floating clay displaces more water than the sinking clay does, perhaps a surprising result. Then they determine the mass of water that is displaced when the clay floats in the water. A comparison of this mass to the mass of the clay itself reveals that they are approximately the same.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Mary R. Hebrank
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Bury Your Trash!
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students bury various pieces of trash in a plotted area of land outside. After two to three months, they uncover the trash to investigate what types of materials biodegrade in soil.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Roarke Horstmeyer
Date Added:
10/14/2015
By Land, Sea or Air
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

In this lesson, students learn that navigational techniques change when people travel to different places land, sea, air and in space. For example, an explorer traveling by land uses different methods of navigation than a sailor or an astronaut.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Lesson Plan
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Denise Carlson
Denise W. Carlson
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Matt Lippis
Penny Axelrad
Date Added:
09/18/2014
Can It Support You? No Bones about It!
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

After completing the associated lesson and its first associated activity, students are familiar with the 20 major bones in the human body knowing their locations and relative densities. When those bones break, lose their densities or are destroyed, we look to biomedical engineers to provide replacements. In this activity, student pairs are challenged to choose materials and create prototypes that could replace specific bones. They follow the steps of the engineering design process, researching, brainstorming, prototyping and testing to find bone replacement solutions. Specifically, they focus on identifying substances that when combined into a creative design might provide the same density (and thus strength and support) as their natural counterparts. After iterations to improve their designs, they present their bone alternative solutions to the rest of the class. They refer to the measured and calculated densities for fabricated human bones calculated in the previous activity, and conduct Internet research to learn the densities of given fabrication materials (or measure/calculate those densities if not found online).

Subject:
Anatomy/Physiology
Applied Science
Engineering
Life Science
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Jeanne Hubelbank
Kristen Billiar
Michelle Gallagher
Terri Camesano
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Can You Catch the Water?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students construct three-dimensional models of water catchment basins using everyday objects to form hills, mountains, valleys and water sources. They experiment to see where rain travels and collects, and survey water pathways to see how they can be altered by natural and human activities. Students discuss how engineers design structures that impact water collection, as well as systems that clean and distribute water.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Hydrology
Physical Science
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Denise W. Carlson
Janet Yowell
Jay Shah
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Can You Hear It?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students drop marbles into holes cut into shoebox lids and listen carefully to try to determine the materials inside the box that the marbles fall onto, illustrating the importance of surface composition on dolphins' abilities to sense materials, depth and texture using echolocation. This activity builds on what students learned in the associated lesson about bycatching by fisheries and how it affects marine habitats and species, especially dolphins. Students learn how echolocation works, why certain animals use it to determine the size, shape and distance of objects, and how people can take advantage of dolphins' echolocation ability when developing bycatch avoidance methods.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Amy Whitt
Matt Nusnbaum
Vicki Thayer
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Can You Hear Me Now?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students apply their knowledge of linear regression and design to solve a real-world challenge to create a better packing solution for shipping cell phones. They use different materials, such as cardboard, fabric, plastic, and rubber bands to create new “composite material” packaging containers. Teams each create four prototypes made of the same materials and constructed in the same way, with the only difference being their weights, so each one is fabricated with a different amount of material. They test the three heavier prototype packages by dropping them from different heights to see how well they protect a piece of glass inside (similar in size to iPhone 6). Then students use linear regression to predict from what height they can drop the fourth/final prototype of known mass without the “phone” breaking. Success is not breaking the glass but not underestimating the height by too much either, which means using math to accurately predict the optimum drop height.

Subject:
Algebra
Mathematics
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
Activities
Author:
Abbie Morneault
Brett Doudican
Kellee Callahan
Date Added:
08/02/2017
Can You Resist This?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

This lab demonstrates Ohm's law as students set up simple circuits each composed of a battery, lamp and resistor. Students calculate the current flowing through the circuits they create by solving linear equations. After solving for the current, I, for each set resistance value, students plot the three points on a Cartesian plane and note the line that is formed. They also see the direct correlation between the amount of current flowing through the lamp and its brightness.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Aubrey McKelvey
Date Added:
09/18/2014
Can You Take the Pressure?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

This lesson introduces students to the concept of air pressure. Students will explore how air pressure creates force on an object. They will study the relationship between air pressure and the velocity of moving air.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Lesson Plan
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Alex Conner
Geoffrey Hill
Janet Yowell
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Tom Rutkowski
Date Added:
09/18/2014
Can You Taste It?
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson and activity, students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. The teacher leads a discussion that allows students to explore why it might be adaptive for humans and other animals to be able to identify nutritious versus noxious foods. This is followed by a demonstration in which a volunteer tastes and identifies a familiar food, and then attempts to taste and identify a different familiar food while holding his or her nose and closing his or her eyes. Then, the class develops a hypothesis and a means to obtain quantitative results for an experiment to determine whether students can identify foods when the sense of smell has been eliminated.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Life Science
Nutrition
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Lesson Plan
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Mary R. Hebrank
Date Added:
09/18/2014
Capillarity—Measuring Surface Tension
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students are presented with a short lesson on the difference between cohesive forces (the forces that hold water molecules together and create surface tension) and adhesive forces (the forces that causes water to "stick" to solid surfaces. The interaction between cohesive forces and adhesive forces causes the well-known capillary action. Students are also introduced to examples of capillary action found in nature and in our day-to-day lives.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Physics
Material Type:
Lesson Plan
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Chuan-Hua Chen
Date Added:
09/18/2014
Capillary Action in Sand
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

As part of a (hypothetical) challenge to help a city find the most affordable and environmentally friendly way to clean up an oil spill, students design and conduct controlled experiments to quantify capillary action in sand. Like engineers and entrepreneurs, student teams use affordable materials to design and construct models to measure the rate of capillary action in four types of sand: coarse, medium, fine and mixed. After observing and learning from a teacher-conducted capillary tube demonstration, teams are given a selection of possible materials and a budget to work within as they design their own experimental setups. After the construction of their designs, they take measurements to quantify the rate of capillary action, create graphs to analyze the data, and make concluding recommendations. Groups compare data and discuss as a class the pros and cons of their designs. Pre- and post-evaluations and two worksheets are provided.

Subject:
Career and Technical Education
Physical Science
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Yaqi Xiong
Date Added:
07/07/2021
Capturing the Sun's Warmth
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

In the exploration of ways to use solar energy, students investigate the thermal energy storage capacities of different test materials to determine which to use in passive solar building design.

Subject:
Applied Science
Engineering
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Denise Carlson
Jeff Lyng
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Sabre Duren
Xochitl Zamora-Thompson
Date Added:
10/14/2015
Carbon Cycles
Read the Fine Print
Educational Use
Rating
0.0 stars

Students are introduced to the concept of energy cycles by learning about the carbon cycle. They will learn how carbon atoms travel through the geological (ancient) carbon cycle and the biological/physical carbon cycle. Students will consider how human activities have disturbed the carbon cycle by emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They will discuss how engineers and scientists are working to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Lastly, students will consider how they can help the world through simple energy conservation measures.

Subject:
Applied Science
Atmospheric Science
Engineering
Physical Science
Material Type:
Activity/Lab
Lesson Plan
Provider:
TeachEngineering
Provider Set:
TeachEngineering
Author:
Janet Yowell
Lauren Cooper
Malinda Schaefer Zarske
Date Added:
09/18/2014