Barge Building: What Floats Your Boat?

How many pennies can an aluminum foil boat hold? That is the challenge in a collaborative activity designed to explore the concept of buoyancy. Learners use aluminum foil to build makeshift boats and test the weight they hold before...

Get the class thinking about why particular objects and animals are shaped the way they are. Considering water resistance and shape, learners assess a series of images and how those objects function in water. They finish by conducting a...

Clay's as good a material as any to build a boat, right? An introductory lesson sets the stage for two activities associated with buoyancy. The first involves building boats out of clay, while the second uses these boats to measure the...

Fifth graders apply the concepts they know regarding mass, volume and density in the previous activities to design a boat. Student teams must make a boat which can travel the waters of the Amazon Rainforest. Each group makes a...

In this float or sink worksheet, 8th graders solve 1 science/math puzzle about displacement of water; the answer is available online.

Students perform an experiment to measure the density of tap water vs. salt water.

Clay itself sinks, but clay boats float. Why? Young engineers build clay boats to learn about buoyancy. They test the weight the boats can hold using washers and then tweak their designs to make improvements, following the engineering...

Eureka! Using the clay boats made in the previous lesson, learners investigate the idea of buoyancy and water displacement to finish the last installment of five in a Floaters and Sinkers unit. Their observations during the activity...

This open-ended boat building exercise is meant to be part of a three-activity series on ships. Links to the other two lessons are included. This particular part is mostly a group lab activity in which they build a boat, find its load...

Written to introduce pupils to buoyancy, this activity has collaborative groups work to design a floatable clay boat. They first observe that a stick of clay sinks in water and then are given their own stick to reshape into a floating...