PBL Pathways
Medical Insurance
Design a plan for finding the best health insurance for your money. Learners compare two health plans by writing and graphing piecewise functions representing the plan rules. Using Excel software, they create a technical report...
Teach Engineering
Applying Statistics to Nano-Circuit Dimensions in Fabrication
Do flexible circuits change dimensions during fabrication? Groups use GeoGebra software to measure the length of pictures of flexible nano-circuits. To determine if the circuits change dimensions, future engineers use Microsoft...
PBL Pathways
Students and Teachers 2
Examine trends in student-to-teacher ratios over time. Building from the first task in the two-part series, classes now explore the pattern of student-to-teacher ratios using a non-linear function. After trying to connect the pattern to...
PBL Pathways
Medical Insurance 2
Make an informed decision when choosing a medical insurance provider. An engaging lesson asks your classes to write piecewise models to represent the cost of different medical plans. The project-based learning activity is a variation of...
Teach Engineering
Searching for Bigfoot and Others Like Him
Individuals create a GIS data layer in Google Earth that displays information about where one might find seven different cryptids. The class members research to find data on cryptid sightings they can include in their data...
PBL Pathways
College Costs 2
What is the financial benefit for attending a community college for the first two years before transferring to a four-year college? The second part of the educational lesson asks young scholars to explore this question through data...
PBL Pathways
Potassium-Argon Dating
Find the age of a fictional sample of rocks using a genuine approach. A well-designed lesson asks young mathematicians to use exponential modeling to analyze half-life. As a project-based learning activity, scholars communicate...
PBL Pathways
Medical Insurance 3
Create a technical report explaining the components of a medical plan through a function. The project-based learning activity gives a medical insurance scenario that young mathematicians model using piecewise functions. Their analyses...
PBL Pathways
College Costs
Predict the year that college costs will double in your state using linear modeling. The first part of this two-part project based learning activity asks young mathematicians to use data from the College Board. They graph the data,...
PBL Pathways
Students and Teachers
Predict the future of education through a mathematical analysis. Using a project-based learning strategy, classes examine the pattern of student-to-teacher ratios over a period of years. Provided with the relevant data, learners create a...
PBL Pathways
Doctors and Nurses
How many nurses does it take to support one doctor? A project-based activity asks learners to analyze state data to answer this question. Classes create polynomial functions from the data of doctors and nurses over a seven-year...
PBL Pathways
Solar Toasters
Help a company maximize their profits! A detailed project-based learning activity examines two production scenarios. Your young scholars write a linear demand function. They then apply the function to develop a revenue, cost, and profit...
Teach Engineering
Using Hooke's Law to Understand Materials
Provide a Hooke for a lesson on elasticity with an activity that has groups investigate a set of springs. They use a set procedure to collect data to calculate the spring constant for each spring using Hooke's Law. The groups...
Teach Engineering
Live Like an Animal
When your parents say that your room's a pig sty, tell them about biomimicry. The sixth installment of a nine-part Life Science unit has scholars research the shelters used by animals in the natural world, like turtle shells. Using the...
National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network
Powers of Ten with the Blue Morpho Butterfly
Explore the powers of ten while examining a Blue Morpho butterfly wing. Learners discover there is a lot more than meets the eye when one looks close enough.