Data Analysis and Probability

Students learn about power generation using river currents. A white paper is a focused analysis often used to describe how a technology solves a problem. In this literacy activity, students write a simplified version of a white paper on an alternative electrical power generation technology.

In this activity, students experience the difficulty that fishermen experience while trying to isolate a target species when a variety of sea animals are found in the area of interest.

In the exploration of ways to use solar energy, students investigate the thermal energy storage capacities of different test materials to determine which to use in passive solar building design.

Students are tasked with designing a room that will absorb the most amount of sound. Students are given a box and need to create a design for the inside of the box that will decrease the decibels that are being measured from the outside of the box. To evaluate this challenge, a speaker within the bo...

To explore different ways of using solar energy, students build a model solar water heater and determine how much it can heat water in a given amount of time. Solar water heaters work by solar radiation and convection.

Student teams design and create LEGO® structures to house and protect temperature sensors. They leave their structures in undisturbed locations for a week, and regularly check and chart the temperatures.

Students are introduced to the electromagnetic spectrum, learn about the devices that use electromagnetic waves, and become experts on one electromagnetic radiation device. This activity allows students to get an in-depth perspective on different devices and how they operate on the electromagnetic s...

Students become coastal engineers as they use their knowledge of storm/beach erosion to create seawalls out of recycled materials. In small groups, students use the engineering design process to consider the costs of materials and determine the best way to use their budget and their knowledge of eac...

Students drop water from different heights to demonstrate the conversion of water's potential energy to kinetic energy. They see how varying the height from which water is dropped affects the splash size. They follow good experiment protocol, take measurements, calculate averages and graph results.

Students determine the coefficient of restitution (or the elasticity) for super balls. Working in pairs, they drop balls from a meter height and determine how high they bounce. They measure, record and repeat the process to gather data to calculate average bounce heights and coefficients of elastici...

Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how this engineering technique is used to determine the environmental impact of everyday products. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materia...

Students are tasked with repairing a sinkhole to prevent it from spreading and getting larger. Using the engineering design process, student groups first research sinkholes and then brainstorm, plan and design the best solution for repairing a sinkhole so that water cannot get through to dissolve ad...

Student teams design and test solar-powered model cars to meet the criteria that they be speedy and compact. They use solar power building model kits, test and improve the vehicles, calculate vehicle speed and volume, rank all team vehicles, pick the best and write a paragraph recommendation to a ca...

Students learn about health risks caused by cooking and heating with inefficient stoves inside homes. They simulate the cook stove scenario and follow the engineering design process steps, including iterative trials, to increase warmth inside a building while reducing air quality problems. A student...

Students analyze cellphone signal data from a high-altitude balloon launch, testing how the strength of the cell signal changes with altitude. Students begin by looking at graphs and discussing the various components, as well as different types of graphs. Students then can practice collecting, plott...

Students learn the history of the waterwheel and common uses for water turbines today. They explore kinetic energy by creating their own experimental waterwheel from a two-liter plastic bottle. They investigate the transformations of energy involved in turning the blades of a hydro-turbine into work...

Students use the engineering design process to design and create soundproof rooms that use only one type of material. They learn and explore about how these different materials react to sound by absorbing or reflecting sound and then test their theories using a box as a proxy for a soundproof room. ...

Students are introduced to measuring and identifying sources of air pollution, as well as how environmental engineers try to control and limit the amount of air pollution. In Part 1, students are introduced to nitrogen dioxide as an air pollutant and how it is quantified. In Part 2, students continu...

In this activity, students experience the difficulty that fishermen experience while trying to isolate a target species when a variety of sea animals are found in the area of interest.

Students learn about the role engineers and mathematicians play in developing the perfect bungee cord length by simulating and experimenting with bungee jumping using washers and rubber bands. Working as if they are engineers for a (hypothetical) amusement park, students are challenged to develop a ...

Students use DNA profiling to determine who robbed a bank. After they learn how the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is used to match crime scene DNA with tissue sample DNA, students use CODIS principles and sample DNA fragments to determine which of three suspects matches evidence obtain at ...

In this activity, students calculate evapotranspiration rates--the amount of water lost from evaporation and transpiration in a growing media (such as a pot or jar) and plant surfaces-- for living plants using soil and hydroponics. By taking measurements and recording changes in plant weight, studen...

Students learn about electrocardiography (ECG) and electromyography (EMG) and apply this knowledge to an engineering design activity. Students use a Jupyter Notebook, an interactive tool containing pre-written Python code, to analyze and plot real EMG and ECG data.

Working as engineering teams in this introductory pneumatics lab, students design and build working pneumatic (air-powered) systems. The goal is to create systems that launch balls into the air. They record and analyze data from their launches.

Students randomly select jelly beans (or other candy) that represent genes for several human traits such as tongue-rolling ability and eye color. Then, working in pairs, students randomly choose new pairs of jelly beans from those corresponding to their own genotypes. The new pairs are placed on too...

Students set up and run the experiments they designed in the Population Growth in Yeasts associated lesson, using simple yeast-molasses cultures in test tubes. Population growth is indicated by the amount of respiration occurring in the cultures, which in turn is indicated by the growth of carbon di...

Students make simple psychrometers to measure humidity using two thermometers, a moist cotton ball and string. They collect inside and outside humidity data, calculate relative humidity, and compare to commercial psychrometer measurements (if available). They complete a worksheet and analyze the dat...

Introduce students to the concept of industrial and safety engineering, using real-world COVID-19 prevention procedures (from their own school or researched online). Students consider cases where schools were forced to close due to outbreaks, then collect data and evaluate real-world procedures desi...

Students use an Arduino Sensing Toolkit to monitor their environment. Students collect data on CO2, temperature, and relative humidity. They then apply this data to a real-world situation of adding a living wall to a specific location and justifying their answer with data.

Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how this engineering technique is used to determine the environmental impact of everyday products. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materia...

Cryptids, creatures of questionable existence, are used as a source of data to guide students into the creation of their own GIS data layer in Google Earth. The activity serves the purpose of a tutorial to teach students how to make data layers with a simple subject.

Students are introduced to several types of common medical sensor devices, such as ear and forehead thermometers, glucometers and wrist blood pressure monitors; they use the latter to measure their blood pressure and pulse rates. Students also measure their heights and weights in order to calculate ...

Students learn about health risks caused by cooking and heating with inefficient stoves inside homes. They simulate the cook stove scenario and follow the engineering design process steps, including iterative trials, to increase warmth inside a building while reducing air quality problems. A student...

Students learn how to use a Jupyter Notebook and identify the frequency, wavelength, amplitude, period, and phase of a simple sinusoidal waveform. As they learn how to label the parts and properties of the waves, they connect these characteristics of waves to various real-world wave examples such a...

Students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Each student adds a small amount of baking yeast to a test tube filled with diluted molasses.

Students learn how to use and graph real-world stream gage data to create event and annual hydrographs and calculate flood frequency statistics. Using an Excel spreadsheet of real-world event, annual and peak streamflow data, they manipulate the data (converting units, sorting, ranking, plotting), s...

Working as engineering teams in this introductory pneumatics lab, students design and build working pneumatic (air-powered) systems. The goal is to create systems that launch balls into the air. They record and analyze data from their launches.

Students submit a picture of a unique “one-of-a-kind” item they own. They then create diagrams that sort these various items based on categories of their choosing. They discuss the process as a class, drawing upon similarities to the creation of the Periodic Table: identifying individual characteris...

Students build on their existing air quality knowledge and a description of a data set to each develop a hypothesis around how and why air pollutants vary on a daily and seasonal basis.

Students explore the response of springs to forces as a way to begin to understand elastic solid behavior. They gain experience in data collection, spring constant calculation, and comparison and interpretation of graphs and material properties to elucidate material behavior.

Students collect a large set of data learn how to use spreadsheets to graph the data and find mean, median, mode, and range. They compare their findings to the national average of water use per person per day and used to evaluate how much water would need to be provided in a town recovering from a d...

Students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Each student adds a small amount of baking yeast to a test tube filled with diluted molasses.