Students explore material properties in hands-on and visually evident ways via the Archimedes' principle. First, they design and conduct an experiment to calculate densities of various materials and present their findings to the class. Using this information, they identify an unknown material based on its density. Then, groups explore buoyant forces. They measure displacement needed for various materials to float on water and construct the equation for buoyancy. Using this equation, they calculate the numerical solution for a boat hull using given design parameters.

In this lesson, the students will summarize their experiences in the Amazon rainforest by developing and presenting a briefing for a T.V. evening news program.

Students are introduced to the concepts of digital organisms and digital evolution. They learn about the research that digital evolution software makes possible, and compare and contrast it with biological evolution.

This article provides an overview of orienteering and geocaching as well as suggestions for incorporating these activities into elementary classrooms

In this activity, students will explore two given websites to gather information on Bone Mineral Density and how it is measured. They will also learn about X-rays in general, how they work and their different uses, along with other imaging modalities. They will answer guiding questions as they explore the websites and take a short quiz after to test the knowledge they gained while reading the articles.

Watch as your students experience the magic of magnetics while exploring a futuristic transportation modality.

Students will review their knowledge of tension and focus on tensile loads and failure caused by them.

Play with a bar magnet and coils to learn about Faraday's law. Move a bar magnet near one or two coils to make a light bulb glow. View the magnetic field lines. A meter shows the direction and magnitude of the current. View the magnetic field lines or use a meter to show the direction and magnitude of the current. You can also play with electromagnets, generators and transformers!

Students conduct experiments to determine the flow rate of faucets by timing how long it takes to fill gallon jugs. They do this for three different faucet flow levels (quarter blast, half blast, full blast), averaging three trials for each level. They convert their results from gallons per second (gps) to cubic feet per second (cfs).

This course will teach fundamentals of control design and analysis using state-space methods. This includes both the practical and theoretical aspects of the topic. By the end of the course, you should be able to design controllers using state-space methods and evaluate whether these controllers are robust to some types of modeling errors and nonlinearities. You will learn to: Design controllers using state-space methods and analyze using classical tools. Understand impact of implementation issues (nonlinearity, delay). Indicate the robustness of your control design. Linearize a nonlinear system, and analyze stability.

All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of medicine delivery (pill, liquid, injection/shot) offers the fastest relief. This challenge question serves as a real-world context for learning all about flow rates. Students study how long various prescription methods take to introduce chemicals into our blood streams, as well as use flow rate to determine how increasing a person's heart rate can theoretically make medicines work more quickly. Students are introduced to engineering devices that simulate what occurs during the distribution of antibiotic cells in the body.

Working individually or in groups, students explore the concept of stress (compression) through physical experience and math. They discover why it hurts more to poke themselves with mechanical pencil lead than with an eraser. Then they prove why this is so by using the basic equation for stress and applying the concepts to real engineering problems.

Using the LEGO® NXT robotics kit, students construct and program robots to illustrate and explore the Fibonacci sequence. Within teams, students are assigned roles: group leader, chassis builder, arm builder, chief programmer, and Fibonacci verifier. By designing a robot that moves based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, they can better visualize how quickly the numbers in the sequence grow. To program the robot to move according to these numbers, students break down the sequence into simple algebraic equations so that the computer can understand the Fibonacci sequence.

In this activity, the students will investigate a variety of plants and animals common to the Amazon through research. They will determine the plant or animal characteristics that make them edible or useful for the trip and learn to categorize them by comparing similarities and/or differences.

This course presents finite element theory and methods for general linear and nonlinear analyses. Reliable and effective finite element procedures are discussed with their applications to the solution of general problems in solid, structural, and fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and fluid-structure interactions. The governing continuum mechanics equations, conservation laws, virtual work, and variational principles are used to establish effective finite element discretizations and the stability, accuracy, and convergence are discussed. The homework and the student-selected term project using the general-purpose finite element analysis program ADINA are important parts of the course.

Objective
SWBAT plan and carry out an investigation using science and engineering practices.

Big Idea
Welcome to the water park! Students will create a “lazy river” boat from aluminum foil that will hold the most passengers.

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.

Students experience firsthand one of the most common water treatment types in the industry today, flocculants. They learn how the amount of suspended solids in water is measured using the basic properties of matter and light. In addition, they learn about the types of solids that can be found in water and the reasons that some are easier to remove than others. Encompassing the concepts of force and motion, attraction and repulsion of charged particles, and properties of matter, during the associated activity students see scientific concepts they already understand through the eyes of engineers who apply them to the removal of solids from water via chemical flocculants.

Students design and create flow charts for the MIT App Inventor tutorials in this computer science activity about program analysis. In program analysis, which is based on determining the behavior of computer programs, flow charts are an important tool for tracing control flow. Control flow is a graphical representation of the logic present in a program and how the program works. Students work through tutorials, design and create flow charts about how the tutorials function, and present their findings to the class. In their final assessment, they create an additional flow chart for an advanced App Inventor tutorial. This activity prepares students with the knowledge and skills to use App Inventor in the future to design and create Android applications.

In the Flow Rate Experiment, students perform hands-on experiments with a common faucet, as well as work with the Engineering Our Water Living Lab to gain a better understanding of flow rate and how it pertains to engineering and applied science. Students calculate the flow rate of a faucet for three different levels (quarter blast, half blast, and full blast). Building on these calculations, students hypothesize about the flow rate in a nearby river, and then use the Engineering Our Water Living Lab to check their hypothesis. For this lesson to be effective, your students need to have a visual feel for the flow in a nearby river.