Experiences and Experiments - There is a Difference

Why do some items feel colder when they are the same temperature? How should you keep your soda cold? What makes the wind blow? These are just some of the things middle schoolers discover when completing a lesson on...

Drop a perfect project into your lesson plans. Groups use different building materials to create models of parachutes for food drops. After testing out their prototypes, they make improvements to their designs.

Are serving sizes for different foods always appropriate for what you need? For this hands-on activity, learners work in groups to estimate what one serving size of various foods are, and then evaluate their hypotheses by measuring...

With Earth Day quickly approaching, as well as many science fairs, why not challenge your class to investigate geothermal energy or other renewable energy resources? There are five driving questions explored in depth here, as well as...

Did youknow that chicken causes the greatest risk of food-borne illness. The fourth unit in a six-part series addresses food safety. Scholars research common scenarios of food causing illness through the National Institute for Health....

Science can be quite tasty. A delectable unit from NASA shows learners why it's important to consider food, nutrition, and health in space. Four lessons explore the idea in great depth, including testing cookie recipes. Along the way,...

Young scholars evaluate a hypothetical experimental design and attempt to improve upon it. In this scientific method lesson, students are presented with an experiment and are instructed to determine its flaws. They conduct their own...

It is safe to say that everything is best in moderation—including preservatives in food. Microbes and oxidation are the main reasons foods become spoiled. Thanks to preservatives, our foods end up having a longer shelf life. But what...

Middle schoolers explore the concepts that enable them to design and conduct sound scientific experiments. They critique a faulty experiment and become familiar with some of the criteria of a good experiment. They conduct their own...

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...