Ships 2: What Floats Your Boat?

After reading about the history of tape dispensers, learners compare and contrast different dispenser designs. Next, teams work within budgetary and time constraints to design a better dispenser. When finished, each engineer reflects on...

This, the sixth in a series of 10 related resources, examines the life and works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African American author, born in 1825, who advocated literacy for both free and enslaved African Americans.

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...

Start with the question in mind with a discussion activity on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. With four focus questions, note-taking prompts, and discussion points, readers practice answering thematic questions based on textual evidence.

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...

Students engage in this, the third in a three-part series on ships. The overall instructional activity series is designed to allow students to extend their understanding of floating, sinking, density, and buoyancy and apply it to 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 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 experiment.

This open-ended boat building exercise is meant to be part of a three-lesson 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 line...

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.