Rubber Band Racers

Class, start your engines. Future engineers design a car with old CDs as wheels. The power source? Some rubber bands will do the trick! This is the first installment of a five-part series.

High school physical scientists collide with motion. They work in pairs to design a paper car that will protect a raw egg during a head-on collision. Measurements of distance traveled, time of run, vehicle specs, and photo gate flags are...

Students gain an understanding of how the powers of 10 and scientific notation can be used to represent the scale of things in the universe. They relate the number of stars in the universe to the number of grains of sand on Earth's beaches.

In this second of three activities, energy engineers plan and create a hydropower dam as they learn how hydroelectric power plants generate electricity. A hydropower puzzle is also included, which can be worked on by teams that finish...

Hands-on challenge to build a car using a rubber band and only two wheels that can go really fast and far. Provides full list of materials with ideas on how to design, build, and test and redesign. Activity focuses on the engineering...

The U.S. produced enough wind energy in 2015 to power all of the homes in Alaska, California, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and...

Take this challenge to design and build a rubber band-powered car and watch it go.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Explore the cumbustion reactions driving the world's automobiles and the chemical solutions used to keep their engines cool with this fun instructional video.

What do you get when you mix LiDAR and integrated photonics technology? Why a self-driving car, of course. A fascinating short video describes how light detection and ranging, LiDAR for short, and integrated photonics technologies enable...

Power up! Class members research a type of power production using a great resource featuring a real-world problem. Groups select a type of power generation and pretend that they represent an engineering firm for their chosen power type....