While we know air exists around us all the time, we usually do not notice the air pressure. During this activity, students use Bernoulli's principle to manipulate air pressure so its influence can be seen on the objects around us.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this online activity, students will practice debugging in the "collector" environment. Students will get to practice reading and editing code to fix puzzles with simple algorithms, loops and nested loops.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
A family of elephants rescues a baby elephant kidnapped by a rival elephant family in this video segment from Nature.
Material Type: Lecture
In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn how to read and interpret a distance–time graph.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Students groups act as aerospace engineering teams competing to create linear equations to guide space shuttles safely through obstacles generated by a modeling game in level-based rounds. Each round provides a different configuration of the obstacle, which consists of two "gates." The obstacles are presented as asteroids or comets, and the linear equations as inputs into autopilot on board the shuttle. The winning group is the one that first generates the successful equations for all levels. The game is created via the programming software MATLAB, available as a free 30-day trial. The activity helps students make the connection between graphs and the real world. In this activity, they can see the path of a space shuttle modeled by a linear equation, as if they were looking from above.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Part 2 of a close reading of excerpts of Federalist No. 10 where Madison makes the case that the type of large republic constructed by the Constitution of 1787 is favorable to any other form.
Material Type: Lesson
By conducting interviews, sharing and assessing data, and writing papers based on their authentic research, students reach their own conclusions on the meaning of the American Dream.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This art history video discussion examines Michelangelo's "Laurentian Library" (vestibule and reading room), begun 1524, opened 1571, San Lorenzo, Florence.
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lecture
Students deal with common issues that arise when designing web pages in HTML. Students will correct errors in a sequence of increasingly complex web pages. In the process they will learn the importance of comments, whitespace, and indentation as tools for making web pages easier to read. At the end of the lesson students create a list of strategies for debugging web pages and ensuring they are easy to read and maintain.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
After reading the story "Dear Mr. Henshaw" by Beverly Cleary, student groups create alarm systems to protect something in the classroom, just as the main character Leigh does to protect his lunchbox from thieves. Students learn about alarms and use their creativity to devise multi-step alarm systems to protect their lockers, desk, pets or classroom door. Note: This activity can also be done without reading the Cleary book.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read, even when the values don't change at runtime.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
We take a whole lesson to learn about `if` statements, what they are, the terminology around them, and what they have to do with "selection" in programs. Students trace simple robot programs on paper to develop a sense of how to read and reason about code with `if` statements in it. Students also try their hand at writing code by hand to handle a robot situation.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read. After guided puzzles, students will end in a freeplay level to show what they have learned and create their own designs.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read, even when the values don't change at runtime.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read. After guided puzzles, students will end in a freeplay level to show what they have learned and create their own designs.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this module, students explore the concept of personal identity formation and transformation in both historical and modern-day societies. The module begins with an overview of what “identity” means and how it can mean different things to different people. In Unit 1, students read first-person narratives that focus on various social identifiers—from race to gender to socioeconomic status—as they begin to frame their understanding of what identity means. Students read informational text, identifying central ideas, analyzing how an author develops his or her claims, and identifying how the sections of the text interact to form those ideas.
Material Type: Module
Students learn about magnets and how they are formed. They investigate the properties of magnets and how engineers use magnets in technology. Specifically, students learn about magnetic memory storage, which is the reading and writing of data information using magnets, such as in computer hard drives, zip disks and flash drives.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students learn about seismology by using a sample seismograph constructed out of common classroom materials. The seismograph creates a seismogram based on vibrations caused by moving a ruler. The students work in groups to represent an engineering firm that must analyze the seismograph for how it works and how to read the seismogram it creates.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Vicki Lombardi's 6th grade students at Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos School district learn how to build a Spider robot. Read more at: http://lasdilearn.blogspot.com/2013/02/third-graders-building-robots-mission.html. Created by Karl Wendt.
Material Type: Lesson
