Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Teaching the Engineering Design Process

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Students follow the steps of the engineering design process (EDP) while learning about assistive devices and biomedical engineering. They first go through a design-build-test activity to learn the steps of the cyclical engineering design...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Off Road Wheelchair Challenge

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Students further their understanding of the engineering design process (EDP) while being introduced to assistive technology devices and biomedical engineering. They are given a fictional client statement and are tasked to follow the...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Portable Wheelchair Ramp Challenge

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Students follow the steps of the engineering design process while learning more about assistive devices and biomedical engineering applied to basic structural engineering concepts. Their engineering challenge is to design, build and test...
Lesson Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Hidden in Plain Sight

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Steganography is the science and art of hiding messages in plain sight so only the sender and intended recipient know the existence of a message. Steganography can be characterized as security through obscurity. Through this lesson,...
Lesson Plan
Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College

Serc: Design a Paper Car: Exploring the Scientific Method

For Teachers 9th - 10th
An engineering design project used to help young scholars practice teamwork and to give them an opportunity to experience engineering practices, such as teamwork and problem-solving.
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Sticks and Stones Will Break That Bone!

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Students learn about the strength of bones and methods of helping to mend fractured bones. During a class demonstration, a chicken bone is broken by applying a load until it reaches a point of failure (fracture). Then, working as...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Students as Scientists

For Teachers 6th - 9th
This curricular unit contains two lessons that let students actually do the work of scientists as they design their own experiments to answer questions they generate. In the first lesson and its associated activity, students conduct a...
Lesson Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Do You See What I See?

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Young scholars research OCR and OCR techniques and then apply those methods to the design challenge by developing algorithms capable of correctly reading a number on a typical high school sports scoreboard.
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Testing With J Unit

For Teachers 9th - 10th
JUnit is a testing method that is included with NetBeans (Java) installs or can be downloaded from the web and included in the Java build. In this activity, students design tests for a provided Java class before the class methods are...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Oil on the Ocean

For Teachers 3rd - 5th
Students learn about oil spills and their environmental and economic effects. They experience the steps of the engineering design process as they brainstorm potential methods for oil spill clean-up, and then design, build, and re-design...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Exploring Solar Power

For Teachers 6th - 8th
This unit provides students the opportunity to explore methods engineers have devised for harnessing sunlight to generate power. Students will initially explore heat transfer and heat storage through the construction, testing, and...
Interactive
Smithsonian Institution

National Air and Space Museum: Wright Brothers: Engineering the Wright Way

For Students 5th - 8th
Great interactive provides students with an opportunity to use engineering skills to design and test airplane wings based on the methods of the Wright brothers. Step into the workshop and design a set of wings that will fly your glider...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Penny Perfect Properties (Solid Liquid Interactions)

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students investigate the property dependence between liquid and solid interfaces and determine observable differences in how liquids react to different solid surfaces. They compare copper pennies and plastic "coins" as the two test...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Daylighting Design

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students explore the many different ways that engineers provide natural lighting to interior spaces. They analyze various methods of daylighting by constructing model houses from foam core board and simulating the sun with a desk lamp....
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Clean Up This Mess

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students are challenged to design a method for separating steel from aluminum based on magnetic properties as is frequently done in recycling operations. To complicate the challenge, the magnet used to separate the steel must be able to...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Air Pollution

For Teachers 4th - 6th
Students are introduced to the concept of air quality by investigating the composition, properties, atmospheric layers and everyday importance of air. They explore the sources and effects of visible and invisible air pollution. By...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Environment

For Teachers 3rd - 5th
Through 10 lessons and more than 20 hands-on activities, students are introduced to the concept of an environment and the many interactions within it. As they learn about natural and human-made environments, as well as renewable and...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Sugar Spill!

For Teachers 5th - 7th
In this activity, students act as environmental engineers involved with the clean up of a toxic spill. Using bioremediation as the process, students select which bacteria they will use to eat up the pollutant spilled. Students learn how...
Lesson Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Using J Unit

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Learners focus on the testing phase of the design process by considering how they have tested computer programs in the past and learning about a new method called JUnit to test programs in the future. JUnit is a testing method that is...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: An Implementation of Steganography

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students apply the design process to the problem of hiding a message in a digital image using steganographic methods, a PictureEdit Java class, and API (provided as an attachment). They identify the problems and limitations associated...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Feel Better Faster: All About Flow Rate

For Teachers 9th - 10th
All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of...
Unit Plan
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Dams

For Teachers 4th - 6th
Through eight lessons, students are introduced to many facets of dams, including their basic components, the common types (all designed to resist strong forces), their primary benefits (electricity generation, water supply, flood...
Lesson Plan
Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College

Serc: Calculating Kinetics of a Student Designed Machine

For Teachers 9th - 10th
In this interactive building experience, students will design and construct a complex machine to do a fairly simple task. Students will calculate several kinetic quantities of different parts of their machine. Students will create an...
Activity
TeachEngineering

Teach Engineering: Inside the Dna

For Teachers 9th - 10th
Students conduct their own research to discover and understand the methods designed by engineers and used by scientists to analyze or validate the molecular structure of DNA, proteins and enzymes, as well as basic information about gel...