TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bees Are Master Pollinators
The study of biomimicry and sustainable design promises great benefits in design application. It affords means by which to promote cost-effective, resourceful, non-polluting avenues for new enterprise. These "blueprints" have existed...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Daylighting Design
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....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Three Color Mystery
Students are introduced to an engineering challenge in which they are given a job assignment to separate three types of apples. However, they are unable to see the color differences between the apples, and as a result, they must think as...
Technovation
Curiosity Machine: Challenges: Engineer an Ocean Bottom Sampler
Can you design a tool that can lift objects from a water depth of at least 1 foot? This website contains the design challenge, tips, a lesson plan, and a place for students to document their design process.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trade Offs and Maximizing Efficiency in a Fast Food Restaurant
Students learn about how to improve efficiency by examining fast food restaurants. More specifically, they learn about the concepts of trade-offs, constraints, increasing efficiency and systems thinking. They consider how to improve the...
Other
Lincoln Public Schools: Applied Technology & Engineering: Solar Dragster Project [Pdf]
In this activity, students must design and build a solar-powered car that can complete a 20-meter racetrack (66 ft.) in the shortest amount of time over flat terrain. They learn about solar energy and car designs, and test their...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Arctic Animal Robot
Students create four-legged walking robots and measure how far they travel across different types of surfaces. They design and create "shoes" to add to the robots' feet and observe the effect of their modifications on the net distance...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Model Heart Valves
Students use provided materials to design and build prototype artificial heart valves. Their functioning is demonstrated using water to simulate the flow of blood through the heart. Upon completion, teams demonstrate their fully...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: e.g. Benedict's Ambulance Patient Safety Challenge
Students are given a fictional client statement- the engineering challenge- and are directed to follow the steps of the EDP to design prototype patient safety systems for small-size model ambulances.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Live Like an Animal
In this activity, students design an innovative human shelter that is inspired and informed by an animal structure. Each group is assigned an animal class, and they gather information about shelters used by the animals in that class....
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Clean Up This Mess
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...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who's Hitchhiking in Your Food?
How can you tell if harmful bacteria are growing in your food? Students learn to culture bacteria in order to examine ground meat and bagged salad samples, looking for common foodborne bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella. After 2-7...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Cold Can You Go?
Students explore materials engineering by modifying the material properties of water. Specifically, they use salt to lower the freezing point of water and test it by making ice cream. Using either a simple thermometer or a mechatronic...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Rural Energy in China: How Can Engineers Make a Difference?
Students learn about five types of renewable energy that are part of engineering solutions to help people in rural communities use less and cleaner energy for cooking and heating. Specifically, students learn about the pollution and...
Other
American Society for Engineering Education: E Gfi: Build a Big Wheel
In this activity, teams of students learn about the history and engineering behind big wheels (Ferris wheels) by constructing a working model using pasta, glue, and teabags.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Crash Scene
Fifth graders are introduced to the (hypothetical) scenario in which they are a team of EnviroTech engineers returning to the U.S. from a conference in Brasilia, Brazil. When their plane crashes deep in the Amazon forest, they work in...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Out of Harry Situations
Under the "The Science Behind Harry Potter" theme, a succession of diverse complex scientific topics are presented to students through direct immersive interaction. Student interest is piqued by the incorporation of popular culture into...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Lifter (Ehd Thrusters)
Students teams each assemble a wing component of a lifter with the goal to test the lifter wing and measure the force exerted when high voltage is applied to it. After an introduction to torque and its use to measure force, students...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Testing the Caverns
Students build model caverns and bury them in a tray of sand. They test the models by dropping balls onto them to simulate an asteroid hitting the Earth. By molding papier-mache or clay around balloons (to form domes), or around small...
TryEngineering
Try Engineering: Making Sense of Sensors
Lesson explore sensors focusing on ones that measure humidity. Students work in teams to design, build, test, and evaluate a hygrometer which was made out of everyday materials to measure humidity levels.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Mummified Troll: Devising a Protection Plan
Students are introduced to the parameters of an engineering challenge in which their principal has asked them to devise an invisible security system to cost-effectively protect a treasured mummified troll, while still allowing for...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Hello, Are You Listening?
Students gain a basic understanding of the engineering components behind telecommunications, in particular, the way telephone communication works to link one phone to another for conventional landline and cellular telephones. During this...
Technovation
Curiosity Machine: Challenges: Engineer a Pneumatic Creature
Create a creature that uses air to create motion with this challenge. Site includes tips, lesson plans, and a place for students to document their design process.
Technovation
Curiosity Machine: Challenges: Engineer a Speedboat
This challenge has students using a zip line to guide a boat to move through the water for long distances. To help the students build a fast and steady boat this site contains a lesson plan as well as tips. Students can also document...