Students continue their pyramid building journey, acting as engineers to determine the appropriate wedge tool to best extract rock from a quarry and cut into pyramid blocks. Using sample materials (wax, soap, clay, foam) representing rock types that might be found in a quarry, they test a variety of wedges made from different materials and with different degrees of sharpness to determine which is most effective at cutting each type of material.

Students are given the following engineering challenge: "The invasion has taken place and we need to find a new home. To ensure your survival beyond Earth's occupation you must design a shelter that can be built on another planet." Then students research the characteristics of a planet of their choosing. They design shelter that enables them to survive on a new planet, and explain it in words to the rest of the class. This is a great activity to add to a unit on the solar system.

Students analyze and begin to design a pyramid. Working in engineering teams, they perform calculations to determine the area of the pyramid base, stone block volumes, and the number of blocks required for their pyramid base. They make a scaled drawing of the pyramid using graph paper.

In this activity, students act as engineers to determine which type of insulation would conserve the most energy.

Working as engineering teams, students design and create model beam bridges using plastic drinking straws and tape as their construction materials. Their goal is to build the strongest bridge with a truss pattern of their own design, while meeting the design criteria and constraints. They experiment with different geometric shapes and determine how shapes affect the strength of materials. Let the competition begin!

Students design, build and test truss bridges made of straws and tape to see how much weight they can support.

Students learn about the variety of materials used by engineers in the design and construction of modern bridges. They also find out about the material properties important to bridge construction and consider the advantages and disadvantages of steel and concrete as common bridge-building materials to handle compressive and tensile forces.

To introduce the two types of stress that materials undergo compression and tension students examine compressive and tensile forces and learn about bridges and skyscrapers. They construct their own building structure using marshmallows and spaghetti to see which structure can hold the most weight. In an associated literacy activity, students explore the psychological concepts of stress and stress management, and complete a writing activity.

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.

Students are introduced to static equilibrium by learning how forces and torques are balanced in a well-designed engineering structure. A tower crane is presented as a simplified two-dimensional case. Using Popsicle sticks and hot glue, student teams design, build and test a simple tower crane model according to these principles, ending with a team competition.

Students are challenged to design, build and test small-scale launchers while they learn and follow the steps of the engineering design process. For the challenge, the "slingers" must be able to aim and launch Ping-Pong balls 20 feet into a goal using ordinary building materials such as tape, string, plastic spoons, film canisters, plastic cups, rubber bands and paper clips. Students first learn about defining the problem and why each step of the process is important. Teams develop solutions and determine which is the best based on design requirements. After making drawings, constructing and testing prototypes, they evaluate the results and make recommendations for potential second-generation prototypes.

Using a household fan, cardboard box and paper towels, student teams design and build their own evaporative cooler prototype devices. They learn about the process that cools water during the evaporation of water. They make calculations to determine a room's cooling load, and thus determine the swamp cooler size. This activity adds to students' understanding of the behind-the-scenes mechanical devices that condition and move air within homes and buildings for human health and comfort.

Students are introduced to the health risks caused by cooking and heating with inefficient cook stoves inside homes, a common practice in rural developing communities. Students simulate the cook stove scenario and use the engineering design process, including iterative trials, to increase warmth inside a building while reducing air quality problems. Students then collect and graph data, and analyze their findings.

This art history video discussion examines the Temple of Portunus (formerly known as, Fortuna Virilis), travertine, tufa, and stucco, c. 120-80 B.C.E., Rome.

Students build model caverns and bury them in a tray of sand. They test the models by dropping balls onto them to simulate an asteroid hitting the Earth. By molding papier-mache or clay around balloons (to form domes), or around small cardboard boxes (to form rectangular structures), students create unique models of their cavern designs.

Welcome to the White House 360 Virtual Tour! This immersive experience will bring you inside the halls of the White House and provide access to all the public rooms on the Ground and State Floors. It will also allow you to examine the rooms and objects even closer than you would in person.

This feature was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Towers have been a part of developed society for centuries, serving a variety of purposes, from watch towers to modern cell towers. In this activity, student groups design and build three types of towers (guyed or cable-supported, free-standing or self-standing, and monopole), engineering them to meet the requirements that they hold an egg one foot high for 15 seconds.

Students work as engineers to design and test trebuchets (in this case LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robots) that can launch objects. During the testing stage, they change one variable at a time to study its effect on the outcome of their designs. Specifically, they determine how far objects travel depending on their weights. As students learn about the different components of robot design and the specific function controls, they determine what design features are important for launching objects.

Students work within constraints to construct model trusses and then test them to failure as a way to evaluate the relative strength of different truss configurations and construction styles. Each student group uses Popsicle sticks and hot glue to build a different truss configuration from a provided diagram of truss styles. Within each group, each student builds two exact copies of the team's truss configuration using his/her own construction method, one of which is tested under shear conditions and the other tested under compression conditions. Results are compiled and reviewed as a class to analyze the strength of different types of shapes and construction methods under the two types of loads. Students make and review predictions, and normalize strengths. Teams give brief presentations to recap their decisions, results and analysis.

Students practice the ability to produce clear, complete, accurate and detailed design drawings through an engineering design challenge. Using only the specified materials, teams are challenged to draw a design for a wind-powered car. Then, they trade engineering drawings with another group and attempt to construct the model cars in order to determine how successfully the original design intentions were communicated through sketches, dimensions and instructions.