West Side Story and Romeo & Juliet—two classics in their own rights that help young literature lovers better analyze different works. Learners research and compare the characters and story elements of West Side Story and Romeo...

Space, the Final Frontier. The nine NASA-created challenges in this unit are designed to teach class members the engineering design process. Each challenge comes with teacher and student pages that can be used individually or as a...

The beauty in this resource is the lengthy list of highly charged, controversial-issue research topics. Categories include issues of race, politics, law, environment, education, athletics, gender, and technology. After selecting a topic,...

Need some activities to go along with your unit? A collection of hands-on activities from PBS offers opportunities to add to your electricity, sound, and force units. The electricity activities revolve around building a...

Let's see how complicated we can make this simple task. The last activity associated with a 10-part series has groups design and build a Rube Goldberg machine. Teams determine a simple task to accomplish and use the engineering design...

Which pulley system will give us a whale of a good time? Teams compare the theoretical and actual mechanical advantages of different pulley systems. They then form a recommendation for how to move a whale from an aquarium back to the ocean.

Bridges rely on tension and compression to keep them standing. Pairs test this principle by constructing simple bridges and applying a force to the center. Teams use the provided worksheet to record their observations of the...

How accurate are robots? Groups draw lines by moving robots backwards and forwards by one rotation of the wheels. Using the appropriate formula, they determine the percent error in the length of the lines in relation to the calculated...

What do cereal, fog, and space shuttles have to do with newspapers? A collection of science investigations encourage critical thinking using connections to the various parts of the newspaper. Activities range from building origami seed...

I can move about freely, but you cannot. The class models the movement through cell membranes by way of passive and active transport. Members of the class play the roles of various proteins, atoms, compounds, and cell actions and mimic...

Individuals discover how to draw cubes on triangle-dot paper. They use cubes to build structures and draw corresponding isometric drawings on dot paper in the second lesson of the series of five. The activity also introduces the concept...

The Fantastic Voyage is becoming close to reality. The class reads an article on the use of nanotechnology in the medical field and participate in a discussion about what they read. The discussion method helps class members become more...

Teams must determine the size of cavern needed to house the citizens of Alabraska to protect them from the asteroid impact. Using scaling properties, teams first determining the number of people that could sleep in a classroom and then...

Groups design the ultimate roller coaster by considering potential and kinetic energy. They test their designs using marbles and then go on to rate each group's design based on aesthetics, loop diameter, and cost.

Elements, to the rescue! Scholars first review the periodic table, and then learn about the first 20 elements and their properties and uses in the fourth of six lessons in the Mixtures and Solutions unit. Applying their newfound...

Explore the relationship between sports and physics in a cross-curricular lesson. Middle and high schoolers prepare a multimedia presentation based on a chosen sport. They answer five physics vocabulary questions about how the laws of...

How do you measure surface tension? The fifth installment of a nine-part series is an experiment where young scientists use tubes of different sizes to measure surface tension. They calculate the average and standard deviation of the...

Teams learn about the size of a nanometer by measuring objects and converting those measurements. A worksheet then tests the groups' abilities to use nanometers by having them determine the size of objects that are too small to...

Groups suspend objects within layers of liquids to determine the densities of different liquids and compare them to the densities of objects calculated in Part 1. The groups then carefully test their calculations by layering the...

Technology or engineering teams are given a task to design, construct, and test the efficiency of a structure that will foster an even temperature throughout an entire sunny day. Intended as a long-term project, pupils research, plan,...

Explore the works of Dr. Seuss, such as Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches and Egg, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Each story lesson includes reading...

Darwin explained the connection between species of finches 150 years before scientists understood DNA. Technology and progressing science proved he was right, yet many struggle to understand how natural selection happens. Scholars use...

Use food coloring in electrophoresis. The last segment in a four-part series mimics DNA fingerprinting by using chromatography. Teams conduct chromatography on food coloring to find colors that use similar pigmentation in their makeup.

The second segment of a seven-part series reviews the challenge of determining whether gargling with salt water helps a sore throat. Individuals journal what they know about the challenge and what they are trying to figure out to...