Students work together in small groups, while competing with other teams, to explore the engineering design process through a tower building challenge. They are given a set of design constraints and then conduct online research to learn basic tower-building concepts. During a two-day process and using only tape and plastic drinking straws, teams design and build the strongest possible structure. They refine their designs, incorporating information learned from testing and competing teams, to create stronger straw towers using fewer resources (fewer straws). They calculate strength-to-weight ratios to determine the winning design.

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Music - Educated Man by Max McFerren

What is data analysis and probability? How do engineers leverage these skills to improve our lives? TeachEngineering explores what data analysis and probability are and different ways that engineers use them to improve and shape the world we live in.

This activity demonstrates how potential energy (PE) can be converted to kinetic energy (KE) and back again. Given a pendulum height, students calculate and predict how fast the pendulum will swing by understanding conservation of energy and using the equations for PE and KE. The equations are justified as students experimentally measure the speed of the pendulum and compare theory with reality.

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Music: Comparsa Latinesque - Kevin MacLeod

Comparsa - Latinesque 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/

Students begin to make sense of the phenomenon of electricity through learning about circuits. Students use the disciplinary core idea of using evidence to construct an explanation as they learn that charge movement through a circuit depends on the resistance and arrangement of the circuit components. Students also explore the disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts of energy and energy transfer in the context of energy from a battery. In one associated hands-on activity, students build and investigate the characteristics of series circuits. In another activity, students design and build flashlights.

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Students learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the greenhouse effect. They construct their own miniature greenhouses and explore how their designs take advantage of heat transfer processes to create controlled environments. They record and graph measurements, comparing the greenhouse indoor and outdoor temperatures over time. Students are also introduced to global issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and their relationship to global warming.

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Music: Santo Rico- Twin Musicom

What can the act of balancing liquid on the surface of a coin tell us about the water molecules and molecular formulas? In this activity, students observe different types of intermolecular forces of water through two simple experiments. During this introductory activity students have hands-on experience visualizing the effects of hydrogen bonding through surface tension and evaporation.


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Music - Believer by Silent Partner

Students begin to explore the idea of a force. To further their understanding of drag, gravity and weight, they conduct activities that model the behavior of parachutes and helicopters. An associated literacy activity engages the class to recreate the Wright brothers' first flight in the style of the "You Are There" television series.

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Students move through the engineering design process as they write Arduino code and use a “digital sandbox” to create new colors out of the three programming primary colors: green, red and blue. They develop their own functions, use them to make disco light shows, and vary the pattern and colors of their shows. The digital sandbox is a hardware and software learning platform powered by a microcontroller that can interact with real-world inputs like light, while at the same time controlling LEDs and other outputs.

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Music: EDM Detection Mode

Through discussion and hands-on experimentation, students learn about the geological (ancient) carbon cycle. They investigate the role of dinosaurs in the carbon cycle and the eventual storage of carbon in the form of chalk. Students discover how the carbon cycle has been occurring for millions of years and is necessary for life on Earth. Finally, they may extend their knowledge to the concept of global warming and how engineers are working to understand the carbon cycle and reduce harmful CO2 emissions.

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Music: Sky_ Scraper

Students learn all about muscles, including the three different types of muscles in the human body and the effects of microgravity on muscles. They also learn how astronauts must exercise in order to lessen muscle atrophy in space. Students discover what types of equipment engineers design to help the astronauts exercise while in space.

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Students examine various materials to investigate how they interact with light. They use five characteristics—translucency, transparency, opaqueness, reflectivity and refractivity—to describe how light interacts with the objects.

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Music - Orange Octopus

What is magnetism? How do we see the phenomenon of magnetism in our daily lives? How do engineers leverage magnetism to help design and create devices we use? TeachEngineering delves into the different types of magnets and how they show up in our world today!

https://www.teachengineering.o....rg/populartopics/mag

Music: Blue Macaw

Students drop water from different heights to demonstrate the conversion of water's potential energy to kinetic energy. They see how varying the height from which water is dropped affects the splash size. They follow good experiment protocol, take measurements, calculate averages and graph results. In seeing how falling water can be used to do work, they also learn how this energy transformation figures into the engineering design and construction of hydroelectric power plants, dams and reservoirs.

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Music: Rank and File - Silent Partner

This unique engineering activity explores helping animals that cannot help themselves. Students perform research and design prosthetic prototypes for an animal to use for its survival. First, students choose an animal from a set of task cards. These cards have descriptions of animals that have injuries that keep them from getting what they need in the wild. Next, students work in pairs to research these animals and their habitats. They then create habitats for their animals to live and model 3D prosthetics for the animals to use with modeling clay. Finally, students share their habitats with their peers.

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Music: Believer - Silent Partner

Students construct paper recombinant plasmids to simulate the methods genetic engineers use to create modified bacteria. They learn what role enzymes, DNA and genes play in the modification of organisms. For the particular model they work on, they isolate a mammal insulin gene and combine it with a bacteria's gene sequence (plasmid DNA) for production of the protein insulin.

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Music: How We Like It - Dan Lebowitz

Student pairs are given 10 minutes to create the biggest box possible using one piece of construction paper. Teams use only scissors and tape to each construct a box and determine how much puffed rice it can hold. Then, to meet the challenge, they improve their designs to create bigger boxes. They plot the class data, comparing measured to calculated volumes for each box, seeing the mathematical relationship. They discuss how the concepts of volume and design iteration are important for engineers. Making 3-D shapes also supports the development of spatial visualization skills. This activity and its associated lesson and activity all employ volume and geometry to cultivate seeing patterns and understanding scale models, practices used in engineering design to analyze the effectiveness of proposed design solutions.

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Music: Milos - Eveningland

Students explore how different materials (sand, gravel, lava rock) with different water contents on different slopes result in landslides of different severity. They measure the severity by how far the landslide debris extends into model houses placed in the flood plain. This activity is a small-scale model of a debris chute currently being used by engineers and scientists to study landslide characteristics. Much of this activity setup is the same as for the Survive That Tsunami activity in Lesson 5 of the Natural Disasters unit.

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Music: Sky Scraper - Geographer

Students learn the different airplane parts, including wing, flap, aileron, fuselage, cockpit, propeller, spinner, engine, tail, rudder, elevator. Then they each build one of four different (provided) paper airplane (really, glider) designs with instructions, which they test in three trials, measuring flight distance and time. Then they design and build (fold, cut) a second paper airplane design of their own creation, which they also test for flight distance and time. They graph the collected class data. Analysis of these experiments with "model" airplanes and their results help them see and figure out what makes airplanes fly and what can be changed to influence the flying characteristics and performance of airplanes.

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Music: Dumb as a Box - Dan Lebowitz

Use this board game to introduce the concepts of energy use in our lives and the very real impact that personal choices can have on our energy consumption, energy bills and fuel supply. The game begins as students select cards that define their modes of transportation and home design. The players roll dice and move around the board, landing on "choice" or "situation" blocks and selecting cards that describe consumer choices and real-life events that impact their energy consumption and annual energy bills. As the players pass gasoline stations or energy bill gates, they must pay annual expenses as defined by their original cards, with amounts altered by the choices they've made along the way. Gasoline cards are collected to represent total consumption. Too many gas-guzzling vehicles can result in total depletion of their gasoline supply – at which point everyone must walk or ride the bus. At the end of the game, the players count their remaining dollars to determine the winner. Discussion questions probe the students to interpret what choices they made and which situations they encountered had the most impact on their energy consumption and energy bills. All game board, card and money files are available online free of charge.
This engineering curriculum aligns to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

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Music: Bicycle Reunited

Students investigate circuits and their components by building a basic thermostat. They learn why key parts are necessary for the circuit to function, and alter the circuit to optimize the thermostat temperature range. They also gain an awareness of how electrical engineers design circuits for the countless electronic products in our world.

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Music: Electrodoodle- Kevin MacLeod