Curriculum Types

What’s the difference between Teach Engineering activities, lessons, and units?

As you browse and search the collection, notice our three curriculum types: activities, lessons, and units. You can use the search filter to limit your searches to one of these document types.

Activities give students a chance to move beyond worksheets and pencils for a more tangible learning experience. Teach Engineering activities often have a design focus so students experience the full or partial engineering design process—a powerful way to generate solutions for any problem. Students gain knowledge through active, project-based learning, rather than from a book, lecture or worksheet. While many activities are standalone, others pair with supporting lessons.

Lessons provide students (and educators) with the content knowledge to successfully work through the lessons’ corresponding activities. Because Teach Engineering is focused on delivering hands-on, engineering curricula, no standalone lessons are permitted in the collection. Each lesson has at least one associated activity that gives students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and cement comprehension.

Units are cohesive collections of lessons and activities mostly designed to be taught together. Each unit includes a schedule with the suggested order to teach the associated lessons and activities. Units can also be seen as thematic categories, from which lessons and activities can be selected to be taught independently from the larger unit. Not all lessons and activities are part of a unit, so we indicate any dependencies to other TE documents.