Inventions and How They Impact Our World

3D printers, selfie sticks, smart watches. GPS, self-driving cars, YouTube. Imagine life without inventions. Believe it or not, these items were all invented in the last 10 years. Inventions, and the inventors responsible for them,...

All of the people in your class would agree that life would be different without the invention of the telephone! Study Alexander Graham Bell's most famous and influential invention through the primary source document of his...

Sitting in a soda parlor, Joseph Freedman notices the difficulty his young daughter has trying to drink from the paper straw in her milkshake. This sparks the invention of a bendy straw. Watch to learn more about this small but widely...

Use this lesson plan to discuss inventions that have changed your class's world and have impacted society. Middle schoolers investigate important inventions of their time and design an invention in a simulated business atmosphere. Modify...

Can you build a homemade speaker out of a potato chip? Bestselling author and do-it-yourself expert William Gurstelle shows you how in his brief presentation at TEDYouth 2012. He encourages young people to be creative and explore...

Students discuss the impact of certain inventions. In this technology instructional activity, students research Thomas Edison and the light bulb on the Internet and discuss how the invention impacted society. Students create their own...

Sandwich: a delicious meal stacked with meats, cheeses, and veggies, or a parish in England? How about both! The sandwich was invented in—yes, you got it—Sandwich, by John Montagu. Watch this creative and inventive video that gives a...

Did you know that 2,700 liters of water are required to produce just one t-shirt? Or that cotton uses more insecticides and pesticides than any other crop? An engaging video traces the cycle of t-shirt production from cotton bolls to the...

Eighth graders design a product or machine and determine the impact their invention has on a person's quality of life. They present their design and machine with a description of its possible impacts to an audience of peers and adults.

Students explore motivations behind human intervention in the stream flow of selected rivers, infer kinds of interventions and their results, and evaluate level of success of such interventions of stream flow as well as environmental...