Students learn about stress and strain by designing and building beams using polymer clay. They compete to find the best beam strength to beam weight ratio, and learn about the trade-offs engineers make when designing a structure.

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Music: Brazil Samba - Bensound.com

Students are presented with the following challenge: their new school is under construction and the architect accidentally put the music room next to the library. Students need to design a room that will absorb the most amount of sound so that the music does not disturb the library. Students use a box as a proxy for the room need to create a design that will decrease the sound that is coming from the outside of the box. To evaluate this challenge, students use a speaker within the box and a decibel meter outside the box to measure the effectiveness of their design.

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Music: Payday by Jason Farnham

Students conduct a research-based activity to explore, graph, and evaluate the speed of slime, or how far and at what rate slime stretches. During the activity, the students review the major concepts of graphing speed by stretching gum or silly putty. After reviewing how to create and read speed on a graph, students create a “super-stretchy” slime sample. Students conduct tensile tests to determine the fastest speed the slime can stretch without snapping. Students analyze the slime stretching data by compiling it in a speed graph using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Lastly, students communicate their findings through a poster presentation

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Music: Daily Beetle - Kevin MacLeod

Students collect, categorize, weigh, and analyze classroom solid waste. The class collects waste for a week and then student groups spend a day sorting and analyzing the garbage with respect to recyclable and non-recyclable items. They discuss ways that engineers have helped to reduce the accumulation of solid waste.

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Music: Feel_Good_Rock by Audionautix

Students explore the concepts of center of mass and static equilibrium by seeing how non-symmetrical objects balance. Using a paper cut-out shape of a parrot sitting on a wire coat hanger, they learn that their parrot exists in stable equilibrium — it returns to its balancing point after being disturbed. The weight of its tail makes the parrot balance upright. Give the parrot a push, and she knocks off balance, but swings back and forth until coming to rest in balance again.

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Music: Daily Beetle - Kevin MacLeod

In this activity, students discover that the concept of mechanical advantage describes reality fairly well. They act as engineers creating a design for a ramp at a construction site by measuring multiple different inclined planes and calculating the theoretical mechanical advantage versus the actual mechanical advantage of each.

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Music - Daily Beetle By Kevin MacLeod

Electricity allows engineers to create systems and devices to benefit all areas of society including entertainment, healthcare, transportation, space travel and more! The phenomenon of electricity inspires innovation in engineering.

This video will touch on:
What electricity is,
The two types of electricity: static and current,
And how engineers can make the world a better place using electricity!

Find lessons and activities around the phenomenon of electricity here: https://www.teachengineering.o....rg/populartopics/ele

Music: Orange Octopus

Students plant sunflower seeds in plastic cups, and once germinated, expose them to varying light or soil moisture conditions. They measure the seedlings' growth every few days using non-standard measurement (inch cubes). After a few weeks, they compare the growth of plants exposed to the different conditions and make comparative bar graphs that they analyze to draw conclusions about plant needs.

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Cold Funk - Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod

Students are given a difficult challenge that requires they integrate what they have learned so far in the unit about wait blocks, loops and switches. They incorporate these tools into their programming of the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robots to perform different tasks depending on input from two touch sensors. This activity helps students understand how similar logic is implemented for other every day device operations via computer programs. A PowerPoint® presentation, pre/post quizzes and worksheet are provided.

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Music: Hot Mess - Audionautix

Hot Mess by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Students investigate the weather from a systems approach, learning how individual parts of a system work together to create a final product. They learn how a barometer works to measure the Earth's air pressure by building a model using simple materials. Students analyze the changes in barometer measurements over time and compare those to actual weather conditions. They learn how to use a barometer to understand air pressure and predict real-world weather changes.

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Music: Payday - Jason Farnham

Students further their understanding of the salmon life cycle and the human structures and actions that aid in the migration of fish around hydroelectric dams by playing an animated PowerPoint game involving a fish that must climb a fish ladder to get over a dam. They first brainstorm their own ideas, and then learn about existing ways engineers have made dams "friendlier" to migrating fish, before being quizzed as part of the game.
This engineering curriculum aligns to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

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Music: Campfire Song

Students create and analyze composite materials with the intent of using the materials to construct a structure with optimal strength and minimal density. The composite materials are made of puffed rice cereal, marshmallows and chocolate chips. Student teams vary the concentrations of the three components to create their composite materials. They determine the material density and test its compressive strength by placing weights on it and measuring how much the material compresses. Students graph stress vs. strain and determine Young's modulus to analyze the strength of their materials.


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Music: Jazzy Frenchy - Bensound.com

Students combine art, gaming culture and engineering by fabricating light-up patches to increase youngsters’ visibility at night. The open-ended project is presented as a hypothetical design challenge: Students are engineers who have been asked by a group of parents whose children go out Pokémon hunting at night to create glowing patches that they adhere to clothing or backpacks to help vehicle drivers see the kids in the dark. Student pairs create Pokémon character stencil designs cut from iron-on fabric patches, adding transparent layers for color. Placed over an EL (electroluminescent) panel that is connected to a battery pack, the stencils create glowing designs. Each team creates a circuit, which includes lengthening the EL panel wiring to make it easier to wear. Then they sew/adhere the patches onto hoodies, messenger bags, hats, pockets or other applications they dream up. The project concludes with team presentations as if to an audience of project clients. Keep the project simple by hand cutting and ironing/sewing, or use cutting machines, laser cutters and sewing machines, if available.

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Music: Fig Leaf Rag - Kevin MacLeod

Fig Leaf Rag by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/r....oyalty-free/index.ht
Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Microcontrollers are the brains of the electronic world, but in order to play with one, you must first get it connected! For this maker challenge, students learn how to connect their Arduino microcontroller circuit boards to computers. First, students are walked through the connection process, helped to troubleshoot common pitfalls, and write their first Arduino programs (setup and loop functions, semicolons, camel case, pin 13 LED). Then they are given the open-ended challenge to create their own blinking LED code—such as writing Morse code messages and mimicking the rhythm of a heartbeat. This practice helps students become comfortable with the fundamental commands before progressing to more difficult programs.
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https://www.teachengineering.o....rg/makerchallenges/v

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Music: Whatdafunk - Audionautix

Whatdafunk by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

In this hands-on activity, students learn how light travels in straight lines and how images are inverted when passing through a small hole by creating their own pinhole camera. They explore the historical development of cameras, from the camera obscura to modern digital cameras, and discuss how engineers have played a role in these advancements.

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Santo Rico - Twin Musicom

Students find the volume and surface area of a rectangular cardboard box (such as a cereal box), and then figure out how to convert that box into a new, cubical box having the same volume as the original. As students construct new, cube-shaped boxes from the original box material, they discover that the cubical box has less surface area than the original, and thus, a cube is a more efficient way to package things.

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Music: Educated Man - Max McFerren

Students discover fluid dynamics related to buoyancy through experimentation and optional photography. Using one set of fluids, they make light fluids rise through denser fluids. Using another set, they make dense fluids sink through a lighter fluid. In both cases, they see and record beautiful fluid motion. Activities are also suitable as class demonstrations. The natural beauty of fluid flow opens the door to seeing the beauty of physics in general.

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Music: Cycles

Students come to understand the basics of engineering associated with the use, selection, and properties of fabrics. A wide variety of natural and synthetic fibers are used in our clothing, home furnishings and in our travel and sports equipment. The specific material chosen for each application depends on how closely the properties of the material match the design needs. This activity focuses on the different characteristics of fabrics and shows students how natural and synthetic fabrics differ from one another. Students weigh the advantages and disadvantages of fabrics when considering the appropriate fabric to be used.

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Music - Thingamajig by Audionautix

Students learn about coordinate systems in general by considering questions concerning what it is that the systems are expected do, and who decided how they look. They attempt to make their own coordinate systems using a common area across all groups and compete to see who can make the best one. Then they analyze why it is that some systems work better than others and consider what those observations mean for evaluating and choosing geographic coordinate systems commonly available today.

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music: Cats and Gats - Dyalla

In this activity, students design and create a slide that will get Jack away from the Giant as fast as possible. Using the engineering design process, students identify the problem, brainstorm solutions, plan a design, create and test a prototype, and make improvements to help Jack escape the Giant!
This engineering curriculum aligns to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

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music - Trancer