Concrete Canoes

Sailboat design requires more than a half-circle and triangle sketch. After viewing a slideshow presentation that outlines the requirements for sailboat design, learners draw a design, perform the needed...

Whatever floats your boat—with some additional weight. The first activity in a five-part series challenges pupils to design a boat to hold pennies. Using the design process, learners design, build, and test their boats, making sure they...

Twisting and turning through the sky, roller coasters are popular attractions at amusement parks around the world, but how exactly do they work? Explore the physics behind these thrilling rides with an engineering design activity....

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...

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...

Students design and execute a lab through which they study the distinctions between density, buoyancy, and volume.

Students construct aluminum foil boats that float while holding the greatest number of pennies. They investigate the concept of water displacement, record their results, and watch a Bill Nye video on buoyancy.

Students extend their understanding of floating, sinking, density, and buoyancy and apply it to the design and testing of ships. students discover that most ships are constructed very similarly-whether they are schooners or destroyers.

Whatever floats your boat. Young engineers learn about density by measuring the masses and volumes of boxes filled with different materials. Using their knowledge of densities, they hypothesize whether objects with given densities will...

Students use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine...