Students design and build structures to support the weight of books for 15 seconds.

Students analyze and begin to design a pyramid. Working in engineering teams, they perform calculations to determine the area of the pyramid base, stone block volumes, and the number of blocks required for their pyramid base. They make a scaled drawing of the pyramid using graph paper.

This task uses language, "half of the stamps," that students in Grade 5 will come to associate with multiplication by the fraction 12. In Grade 3, many students will understand half of 120 to mean the number obtained by dividing 120 by 2. For students who are unfamiliar with this language the task provides a preparation for the later understanding that a fraction of a quantity is that fraction times the quantity.

This art history video discussion examines the "Standard of Ur", c. 2600-2400 B.C.E. (British Museum).

From audience analysis to giving a presentation, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking will guide students through the speech making process. The authors focus on the process of speech making because they have created this book to be a user-friendly guide to creating, researching, and presenting public speeches. While both classic and current academic research in public speaking guide this book, the authors believe that a new textbook in public speaking should first, and foremost, be a practical book that helps students prepare and deliver a variety of different types of speeches — and that is the primary goal of this book.With practicality in mind, the authors developed, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking, as a streamlined public speaking textbook. Many public speaking textbooks today contain over twenty different chapters, which is often impossible to cover in a ten-week quarter or a sixteen-week semester; this textbook is eighteen unique chapters. The fifteen chapters are divided into four clear units of information: introduction to public speaking, speech preparation, speech creation, and speech presentation.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the different stars in the night sky as they get older? The Star in a Box application lets you explore the life cycle of stars. It animates stars with different starting masses as they change during their lives. Some stars live fast-paced, dramatic lives; others change very little for billions of years. The app visualises the changes in mass, size, brightness and temperature for all these different stages.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the different stars in the night sky as they get older? The Star in a Box application lets you explore the life cycle of stars. It animates stars with different starting masses as they change during their lives. Some stars live fast-paced, dramatic lives; others change very little for billions of years. The app visualises the changes in mass, size, brightness and temperature for all these different stages.

To get a better understanding of complex networks, students create their own, real social network example by interacting with their peers in the classroom and documenting the interactions. They represent the interaction data as a graph, calculate two mathematical quantities associated with the graph—the degree of each node and the degree distribution of the graph—and analyze how these quantities can be used to infer properties of the social network at hand.

To navigate, you must know roughly where you stand relative to your designation, so you can head in the right direction. In locations where landmarks are not available to help navigate (in deserts, on seas), objects in the sky are the only reference points. While celestial objects move fairly predictably, and rough longitude is not too difficult to find, it is not a simple matter to determine latitude and precise positions. In this activity, students investigate the uses and advantages of modern GPS for navigation.

Students act as chemical engineers and use LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robotics to record temperatures and learn about the three states of matter. Properties of matter can be measured in various ways, including volume, mass, density and temperature. Students measure the temperature of water in its solid state (ice) as it is melted and then evaporated.

Watch different types of molecules form a solid, liquid, or gas. Add or remove heat and watch the phase change. Change the temperature or volume of a container and see a pressure-temperature diagram respond in real time. Relate the interaction potential to the forces between molecules.

Watch different types of molecules form a solid, liquid, or gas. Add or remove heat and watch the phase change. Change the temperature or volume of a container and see a pressure-temperature diagram respond in real time. Relate the interaction potential to the forces between molecules.

Heat, cool and compress atoms and molecules and watch as they change between solid, liquid and gas phases.

This hands-on activity explores the concept of static electricity. Students attract an O-shaped piece of cereal to a charged comb and watch the cereal jump away when it touches the comb. Students also observe Styrofoam pellets pulling towards a charged comb, then leaping back to the table.

Student groups rotate through four stations to examine light energy behavior: refraction, magnification, prisms and polarization. They see how a beam of light is refracted (bent) through various transparent mediums. While learning how a magnifying glass works, students see how the orientation of an image changes with the distance of the lens from its focal point. They also discover how a prism works by refracting light and making rainbows. And, students investigate the polar nature of light using sunglasses and polarized light film.

Students are introduced to the technology of flexible circuits, some applications and the photolithography fabrication process. They are challenged to determine if the fabrication process results in a change in the circuit dimensions since, as circuits get smaller and smaller (nano-circuits), this could become very problematic. The lesson prepares students to conduct the associated activity in which they perform statistical analysis (using Excel® and GeoGebra) to determine if the circuit dimension sizes before and after fabrication are in fact statistically different. A PowerPoint® presentation and post-quiz are provided. This lesson and its associated activity are suitable for use during the last six weeks of the AP Statistics course; see the topics and timing note for details.

Students apply pre-requisite statistics knowledge and concepts learned in an associated lesson to a real-world state-of-the-art research problem that asks them to quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of different cracked steel repair methods. As if they are civil engineers, students statistically analyze and compare 12 sets of experimental data from seven research centers around the world using measurements of central tendency, five-number summaries, box-and-whisker plots and bar graphs. The data consists of the results from carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer patched and unpatched cracked steel specimens tested under the same stress conditions. Based on their findings, students determine the most effective cracked steel repair method, create a report, and present their results, conclusions and recommended methods to the class as if they were presenting to the mayor and city council. This activity and its associated lesson are suitable for use during the last six weeks of the AP Statistics course; see the topics and timing note for details.

Working as if they are engineers aiming to analyze and then improve data collection devices for precision agriculture, students determine how accurate temperature sensors are by comparing them to each other. Teams record soil temperature data during a class period while making changes to the samples to mimic real-world crop conditions—such as the addition of water and heat and the removal of the heat. Groups analyze their collected data by finding the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. Then, the class combines all the team data points in order to compare data collected from numerous devices and analyze the accuracy of their recording devices by finding the standard deviation of temperature readings at each minute. By averaging the standard deviations of each minute’s temperature reading, students determine the accuracy of their temperature sensors. Students present their findings and conclusions, including making recommendations for temperature sensor improvements.