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Lesson Plan
Discovery Education

Future Fleet

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Turn your pupils into engineers who are able to use scientific principals to design a ship. This long-term project expects pupils to understand concepts of density, buoyancy, displacement, and metacenter, and apply them to constructing a...
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Lesson Plan
University of Southern California

Design and Test an Air Lift Siphon

For Students 6th - 12th Standards
Build an air lift siphon using your mad physics skills! Learners first investigate the importance of circulating water in aquaponics systems. They then use density to their advantage as they engineer an air lift siphon
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Floating Pencil

For Teachers 4th - 8th
Students discover how salt water makes a pencil float better than freshwater by measuring and comparing the lengths of the portion of the pencil that floats above the water surface. They then determine if an unknown water sample is...
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Worksheet
Curated OER

Cartesian Diver Lab

For Students 6th - 8th
In this Cartesian diver lab, students explain using text and diagrams how the Cartesian diver works. Students evaluate ways in making their lab design better. Students make predictions of how changing the variable would change the...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Float Your Boat

For Teachers 5th - 8th
Students design an experiment to find density using Archimedes' Principle. In this physics lesson, students calculate density using mass and volume. They share their findings in class.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Condiment Diver: The World's Simplest Cartesian Diver

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Middle schoolers explain what density is in their own words. In this physics lesson, students perform the condiment experiment and explain why some float and some sink. They share their findings in class.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Ships 2: What Floats Your Boat?

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Students design, build, and test the specifications (water displacement and load line) for a model boat. The lesson focuses especially on integrating design principles with inquiry-based experimental skills.
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Activity
1
1
Teach Engineering

Rock and Boat

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Present the class with a question on whether the water level of a pond will rise they take a large rock out of a boat and drop it into the pond. Groups come down on all sides of the question and try to justify their answers. The activity...
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Lesson Plan
1
1
Teach Engineering

Archimedes' Principle, Pascal's Law and Bernoulli's Principle

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
What do Pascal's law, Archimedes' Principle, and Bernoulli's Principle have to do with fluid mechanics? The included PowerPoint presentation provides the basic definitions and equations associated with the three. A set of homework...
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Lesson Plan
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Can You Canoe?

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
A neat handout immerses learners in the history of canoe making. After reading, small groups of mini engineers work to craft a canoe that will not be immersed! This is an ideal exercise in engineering design for your STEM curriculum or...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Sink or Float?

For Teachers 5th - 8th
Students analyze the relationship between density, buoyancy, and salinity. In this chemical properties instructional activity, students read a background activity for the instructional activity and experiments to the topics. Students...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Properties of Matter: "Sink or Swim"

For Teachers 3rd
Third graders recognize that different materials have different properties which can be observed such as texture and bouyancy, and compare and contrast, through observation, ability of some objects to float because of action of...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Chemistry: The Case of the Sunken Ice Cube

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Students examine a density demonstration involving ice cubes and beakers of water and alcohol. After observing how one ice cube floats in water and sinks in alcohol, they determine which mixture of the two would suspend the ice cube in...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Bathtub Physics - Density, Buoyancy and Flotation

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Students study Archimedes' Principle, flotation and the reaction of buoyant forces and explain the relationship between density and flotation.
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Activity
1
1
Teach Engineering

Cartesian Diver

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Amaze your scholars with an activity that uses a Cartesian diver to demonstrate Pascal's Law, Archimedes' Principle, and the Ideal Gas Law. Groups then repeat the process and make their own diver move up and down in a bottle.
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Lesson Plan
1
1
Teach Engineering

Above-Ground Storage Tanks in the Houston Ship Channel

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Introduce your class to storage tank failures caused by major storms with an activity that looks at how the concepts of Archimedes' Principle and Pascal's Law affect the storage tanks along the Houston Ship Channel. The background...
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Activity
1
1
Teach Engineering

Above-Ground Storage Tank Design Project

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
The challenge: determine whether a tank will float. A design activity has groups work as engineering teams in order to determine the stability of given tanks and liquid contents. The teams need to determine the equations to calculate the...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Fishy Physics

For Teachers 4th - 9th
Students explore how fish are able to move easily from one depth to another in water.  In this fish lesson students create their own balloon fish. 
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Clay Boats

For Teachers 7th
Seventh graders are given the opportunity to use model-building as a way to help comprehend the forces and phenomena at work in the world around them. They use both successful and unsuccessful models to make inferences, refine...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

How to Float an Egg

For Teachers 3rd - 4th
Use the scientific method to experiment with an egg. Your class can examine buoyancy and density by finding how many spoons of salt are needed to float an egg. They can predict, experiment, record data, and analyze results.
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Activity
Museum of Science

Design a Submarine

For Teachers K - 6th Standards
Don't just sink the boat. Using a closed container as a submarine, pupils experiment to see what to add to the container to make it float, sink to the bottom, and hover in the middle. After finding one option, learners see if they can...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Does Soap Float?

For Teachers 3rd - 5th
Students form hypotheses and carry out an investigation in order to answer a central question: Does soap float? The focus of this instructional activity is on scientific inquiry, but it incorporates scientific topics such as sinking and...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Galapagos Rift Expedition Come On Down!

For Teachers 7th - 8th
Students research the development and implementation of a research vessel/vehicle used for deep ocean exploration. In this oceanography lesson, students calculate the density of objects by determining the mass and volume.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

What Boat Designs Float the Best?

For Teachers 5th
Fifth graders investigate buoyancy by conducting a science experiment.  In this water properties lesson, 5th graders predict which of their different paper boat designs will float for the longest period.  Students conduct the experiment...

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