Recently Added Curriculum

In India, many small farms (less than 5 acres) face challenges in managing essential farming tasks such as plowing, cultivating, spraying, weeding, and tilling. In this activity, students design and build a solution to improve one of three key farming tasks: picking up objects from the ground (deweeding), spreading seeds (seeding), or spraying water to rows on the sides (watering). Students choose one of these tasks and focus on creating a more efficient, practical way to complete it, applying engineering principles to solve real-world agricultural challenges.

The Milton Bradley game “Simon” is an electronic version of the game “Simon Says.” The object of the game is for a player to press the color that matches the sequence and interval presented. As the player completes the task of depressing the emitted bar, another color or sequence addendum is added, thus increasing the difficulty. The objective of this activity is to reverse engineer the game, creating an analog version that provides kinesthetic, audio, and visual stimulation events that can further support memory improvement, critical thinking, and visual processing. In this activity, students utilize components of computational thinking such as decomposition and debugging to design their games. Students “live” the code by interacting via gamification in small groups to play their games, including randomizing, sequencing, and data analyzing the colors and patterns for each turn.

Students design beach clothing that is both fashionable and functional, meeting two key criteria: the clothing stays cool (considering factors such as fabric weight and thickness) and effectively shields against ultraviolet (UV) radiation. By the end of this activity, students gain a deeper understanding of how UV radiation affects the skin and observe how different fabrics interact with UV light.

Students use original research and field trips to investigate the content, layout, and structure of local international markets (e.g., a Korean, Mexican, or Turkish market). Students learn about the cultural components and importance of the stores to the local immigrant populations through a multi-day field trip experience. Students investigate the food staple products of the store, and where they are situated within the layout of the market. Considering the area, available space, and shelving, students propose a store remodel using the engineering design process to celebrate culture, encourage diverse customers, and maximize profits. Student groups redesign an international store using research-based store placement best practices. The class conducts gallery walks and receives feedback from international partners to improve the final design. After the final designs are completed, students compare the patterns and trends of the periodic table to types of grocery stores.

This activity considers the use of asymmetric membranes as micro filtration devices to remove algae from lake water. Students compare the efficiency of different membranes and/or repeated filtration processes to remove algae content.

Students focus on the engineering design process to ask, research, imagine, plan, create, and improve a prototype for a solution of a problem they wish to solve. Students perform each step of engineering design to better understand how engineers approach problem solving. At the planning stage, students will not only manually draft their prototypes but also use CAD software (e.g., Tinkercad), which is an important engineering tool during the design process. Finally, students create their idea according to their own design specifications using the materials provided. As they learn more about prototyping and the engineering design process, students will develop a better understanding of the concepts and importance of drafting and CAD.

Students act as civil engineers and use the engineering design process to design and construct a building in an earthquake-prone area for a local developer. Students will have to make decisions on how many materials they use, because they will have a budget to meet. The building materials will include spaghetti noodles, toothpicks, flexible straws, marshmallows, and hot glue. They will also have to construct a building with specific size constraints and that can withstand a 2.5 lb. weight being placed on top of it. After construction, their building with the weight will be placed on a shake table. Students will measure the time their building remains standing during the earthquake. Students will review where their building first collapsed and redesign their building to try to make it last longer in a second earthquake. Finally, each group will use all of their information to develop a presentation of their results for the developer in hopes of winning the bid.

Students explore the periodic table of elements and connect it to the concept of clustering in machine learning. Students create their own clustering system for the elements based on various criteria, such as atomic mass, reactivity, and state at room temperature. They justify their element groupings and engage in discussions to compare and contrast different clustering systems. By analyzing the patterns and trends within the periodic table, students develop a deeper understanding of the properties and organization of elements, while also gaining insight into data analysis, classification, material properties, and collaboration, all of which have connections to engineering.

Students use waste materials to create a medium to hold plants for an aquaponic water system as they learn to reuse materials and about the life system of plants (producers). As they learn about photosynthesis, they better understand what a plant needs to grow and how it develops. While engaging in this activity, students learn about food webs in order to identify the relationships among producers, consumers, and decomposers in an ecosystem. As students are introduced to and learn about the Sustainable Development Goals, they have the opportunity to learn about Bolivia and the United States and make connections between the two countries.

Students engineer a device to alert peers who are about to be late to class. To do this, students first define the problem and success criteria for an alert system. Students code an Arduino circuit to display a repeating/blinking message on an LCD screen with LED lights (in Tinkercad). Then they work collaboratively in groups of 2 or 3 to build (put it together) an Arduino circuit with an LCD screen and LED lights. Students create a simulation first and then build a physical model. Students learn more about circuitry and coding and how the skills apply to many applications in the real world. Students have the option to refine and improve their design by adding other elements to their warning system. Finally, they share and analyze their solutions based on their defined success criteria.

Students create a leakproof and sustainable roof utilizing natural and recycled resources available in the country of Ghana.

Students become engineers whose goal is to research, plan, design, build, test, and improve a mitigation structure/device for fruiting trees/plants in their early stages of growth (sapling) to prevent crop loss. Each group focuses on a different region in the world to research the trees, environmental conditions, causes of crop or tree loss, and available reusable materials. They then engineer a structure that improves the safety of the saplings, while also maintaining the conditions necessary for plant growth, using the six most common types of single-use plastic waste identified by the United Nations Environmental Program. Students use the engineering design process to create, test, and improve their devices.

Students build a functional electrophoresis gel and run samples of food coloring through the gel. As they learn how to build a functioning gel, they get a better understanding of the physics of the gel box and what the results can say about DNA and proteins.

This is a series of short activities that introduce students to physical computing, where they will use a basic breadboard, an Arduino Uno, and components to code and run a single and double LED, a buzzer, and a touch sensor. After successfully coding and wiring the individual components, they have the choice to either set up a realistic traffic light or a buzzer activated by a touch sensor.

Students combine paper strips to measure how much gravitational force the paper can withstand by adding masses to the combined paper strips until they tear. Students compare the strength of one paper strip versus the combination of two, three, four, and five strips. Students cut out paper strips and glue them together using a glue stick or a glue bottle. Students punch holes in the paper strips and tie yarn or string through the hole on the paper strip. As they hang the paper strips on the ring stand, they add weights such as a 100 g mass to the paper. When the paper strips tear, the students will record the mass before the paper broke and the mass that caused the tear in the paper. Students will notice that the paper strips tear at increasing masses because of the strength of the combined paper strips. Students need to understand that composite materials are not created by changing their chemical and physical components. After recording the data, students create a graph with the number of strips on the X-axis and the mass at which the paper tears on the Y-axis. Students compare their findings with the other groups and discuss the results of the project. They discuss why the paper strips could hold more mass as the number of combined paper strips increased. They need to think about what other materials they use in daily life that could be made of composite materials.