TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Mice Rule! (Or Not)
Students explore the relationships between genetics, biodiversity, and evolution through a simple activity involving hypothetical wild mouse populations. First, students toss coins to determine what traits a set of mouse parents...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Floats Your Boat?
Learners use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Fortified Breakfast
In this lesson, students will learn that minerals are a necessary part of our diet. They will learn that different minerals have different functions in the body. More specifically, they will discover that iron is necessary to carry...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Discovering Friction
With a simple demonstration activity, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Then, in the Associated Activity (Sliding and Stuttering), they work in teams to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Factors Affecting Friction
In this lesson, students use previous knowledge about friction to formulate hypotheses concerning the effects of weight and contact area on the amount of friction between two surfaces. In the Associated Activities (Does Weight Matter?...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Dominant?
In a class discussion format, the teacher presents background information about basic human genetics. The number of chromosomes in both body cells and egg and sperm cells is covered, as well as the concept of dominant and recessive...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Put Your Heart Into Engineering
This lesson contains background about the blood vascular system and the heart. Also, the different sizes of capillaries, veins, and arteries, and how they affect blood flow through the system. We will then proceed to talk about the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Hot and What's Not?
With the help of simple, teacher-led demonstration activities, young scholars learn the basic physics of heat transfer by means of conduction, convection, and radiation. They also learn about examples of heating and cooling devices, from...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: An Introduction to Inclined Planes
Students are introduced to the concept of simple tools and how they can make difficult or impossible tasks easier. They begin by investigating the properties of inclined planes and how implementing them can reduce the force necessary to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Imagine Life Without Friction
Students are introduced to the concept of inertia and its application to a world without the force of friction acting on moving objects. When an object is in motion, friction tends to be the force that acts on this object to slow it down...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Will Biodegrade?
Learners investigate what types of materials biodegrade in the soil, and learn what happens to their trash after they throw it away. The concepts of landfills and compost piles will be explained, and the students will have an opportunity...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Lunar Learning
Why does the Moon not always look the same to us? Sometimes it is a big, bright, circle, but, other times, it is only a tiny sliver, if we can see it at all. The different shapes and sizes of the slivers of the Moon are referred to as...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Habitat Mapping
The marine environment is unique and requires technologies that can use sound to gather information since there is little light underwater. In this lesson, the middle schoolers will be shown benthic habitat images produced by GIS. These...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Marine Animal Tracking
This lesson engages students in an activity to monitor animal foraging behavior on a spatial scale. The students will break into groups and track each other's movements as they move through a pre-determined course. The results will be...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sounds Like Music
Music can loosely be defined as organized sound. The lesson objectives, understanding sound is a form of energy, understanding pitch, understanding sound traveling through a medium, and being able to separate music from sound, can...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Other Water Cycle
For students that have already been introduced to the water cycle, this instructional activity is intended as a logical follow-up. Students will learn about human impacts on the water cycle that create a pathway for pollutants beginning...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Do Plants Eat?
Through a teacher-led discussion, young scholars realize that the food energy plants obtain comes from sunlight via the plant process of photosynthesis. They learn what photosynthesis is, at an age-appropriate level of detail and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Generators: Three Mile Island vs. Hoover Dam
Students are given a history of electricity and its development into the modern age lifeline upon which we so depend. The methods of power generation are introduced, and further discussion of each technology's pros and cons follows.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Particle Sensing: The Coulter Counter
Students are presented with a short lesson on the Coulter principle, an electronic method to detect microscopic particles and determine their concentration in fluid. Depending on the focus of study, students can investigate the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Physics of Roller Coasters
Students explore the physics utilized by engineers in designing today's roller coasters, including potential and kinetic energy, friction, and gravity. First, students learn that all true roller coasters are completely driven by the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: From Sunlight to Electric Current
The lesson will first explore the concept of current in electrical circuits. Current will be defined as the flow of electrons. Photovoltaic (PV) cell properties will then be introduced. This will lead to the principle of "Conservation of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Heat From the Sun
In this lesson, students will first discuss where energy comes from, including sources such as fossil fuels, nuclear, and such renewable technologies as solar. After this initial exploration, students will investigate the three main...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who Needs What?
The teacher leads a discussion in which students identify the physical needs of animals, and then speculate on the needs of plants. With guidance from the teacher, the students then help design an experiment that can take place in the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Surface Tension Basics
Young scholars are presented with the question: "Why does a liquid jet break up into droplets?" and introduced to its importance in inkjet printers. A discussion of cohesive forces and surface tension is included, as well as surface...