Waves

This lesson introduces the concepts of wavelength and amplitude in transverse waves. In the associated activity, students use ropes and their bodies to investigate different wavelengths and amplitudes.

Students learn that sound is energy and has the ability to do work. Students discover that sound is produced by a vibration and they observe soundwaves and how they travel through mediums. They understand that sound can be absorbed, reflected or transmitted.

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...

They make a model of a seismograph—a measuring device that records an earthquake on a seismogram. Students also investigate which structural designs are most likely to survive an earthquake.

In this activity, students will experience echolocation themselves. They actually try echolocation by wearing blindfolds while another student makes snapping noises in front of, behind, or to the side of them.

Students model and design the sound environment for a room. They analyze the sound performance of different materials that represent wallpaper, thick curtains, and sound-absorbing panels.

In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the difference between longitudinal and transverse waves.

Students learn about sound with an introduction to the concept of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds.

Students learn the five words that describe how light interacts with objects: transparent, translucent, opaque and refraction.

To further their understanding of sound energy, students identify the different pitches and frequencies created by a vibrating ruler and a straw kazoo. They create high- and low-pitch sound waves.

Students learn about echolocation: what it is and how engineers use it to "see" things in the dark, or deep underwater. They also learn how animals use echolocation to catch their meals and travel the ocean waters and skies without running into things.

Students continue to build a rigorous background in human sensors and their engineering equivalents by learning about electronic touch, light, sound and ultrasonic sensors that measure physical quantities somewhat like eyes, ears and skin. Using microphones connected to computers running (free) Auda...

Students examine the existence of sound by listening to and seeing sound waves while conducting a set of simple activities as a class or in pairs at stations. Students describe sound in terms of its pitch, volume and frequency. They use this knowledge to discuss how engineers study sound waves to he...

In this activity, students play the game Simon Says to make the amplitudes and wavelengths defined by the teacher.

Students work with partners to create four different instruments to investigate the frequency of the sounds they make. Teams may choose to make a shoebox guitar, water-glass xylophone, straw panpipe or a soda bottle organ (or all four!).

Students are introduced to the sound environment as an important aspect of a room or building. Several examples of acoustical engineering design for varied environments are presented.

Students learn about sound and sound energy as they gather evidence that sound travels in waves. Teams work through five activity stations that provide different perspectives on how sound can be seen and felt.

Student groups rotate through four stations to examine light energy behavior: refraction, magnification, prisms and polarization. They see how a beam of light is refracted (bent) through various transparent mediums. While learning how a magnifying glass works, students see how the orientation of an ...

Students investigate how sound travels through string and air. They are given a design challenge to redesign the string telephone for distance.

This lesson introduces the concepts of longitudinal and transverse waves. Students see several demonstrations of waves and characterize them by transverse and longitudinal behavior.

Students make sense of the design challenges engineers face that arise from earthquake phenomena. Students work as engineering teams to explore concepts of how engineers design and construct buildings to withstand earthquake damage by applying elements of the engineering design process by building t...

Students are introduced to sound energy concepts and how engineers use sound energy. Through hands-on activities and demonstrations, students examine how we know sound exists by listening to and seeing sound waves

Students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.

Students explore how sound waves move through liquids, solids and gases in a series of simple sound energy experiments.

Students learn about tsunamis, discovering what causes them and what makes them so dangerous. They learn that engineers design detection and warning equipment, as well as structures that that can survive the strong wave forces. In a hands-on activity, students use a table-top-sized tsunami generator...

During this lesson, the electromagnetic spectrum is explained and students learn that visible light makes up only a portion of this wide spectrum. Students also learn that engineers use electromagnetic waves for many different applications.

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 use the spectrographs from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about light sources. Using their data, they make comparisons between different light sources and make conjectures about the composition of a mystery light source.

Students create and decorate their own spectrographs using simple materials and holographic diffraction gratings. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual components of light.

Students use simple materials to design an open spectrograph so they can calculate the angle light is bent when it passes through a holographic diffraction grating. A holographic diffraction grating acts like a prism, showing the visual components of light.

In a hands-on way, students explore light's properties of absorption, reflection, transmission and refraction through various experimental stations within the classroom. To understand absorption, reflection and transmission, they shine flashlights on a number of provided objects.

Filtering is the process of removing or separating the unwanted part of a mixture. In signal processing, filtering is specifically used to remove or extract part of a signal, and this can be accomplished using an analog circuit or a digital device (such as a computer). In this lesson, students learn...

Students learn the basic properties of light — the concepts of light absorption, transmission, reflection and refraction, as well as the behavior of light during interference. Lecture information briefly addresses the electromagnetic spectrum and then provides more in-depth information on visible li...

Students learn about the basic properties of light and how light interacts with objects. They are introduced to the additive and subtractive color systems, and the phenomena of refraction. Students further explore the differences between the additive and subtractive color systems via predictions, ob...

Students learn about frequency and period, particularly natural frequency using springs. They learn that the natural frequency of a system depends on two things: the stiffness and mass of the system. Students see how the natural frequency of a structure plays a big role in the building surviving an ...

Students use these concepts to understand how dolphins use echolocation to locate prey, escape predators, navigate their environment, such as avoiding gillnets set by commercial fishing vessels. Students also learn that dolphin sounds are vibrations created by vocal organs, and that sound is a type ...

Students learn how AM radios work through basic concepts about waves and magnetic fields. Then students learn general concepts about magnetic fields, leading into how radio waves are created and transmitted.

Students learn about the types of seismic waves produced by earthquakes and how they move through the Earth. Students learn how engineers build shake tables that simulate the ground motions of the Earth caused by seismic waves in order to test the seismic performance of buildings.

Students learn about how engineers design and build shake tables to test the ability of buildings to withstand the various types of seismic waves generated by earthquakes. Just like engineers, students design and build shake tables to test their own model buildings made of toothpicks and mini marshm...

Students gain a good knowledge base as to how sound and music are related, and what distinguishes them from each other. They come to understand that sound is a form of energy that travels through a medium. Through demonstrations and experiences with glass bottles, tuning forks and stringed instrumen...

In this lesson and its associated activity, students learn about aerogel, the silicon-based solid with a sponge-like structure. Students also learn about density and how aerogel is 99.8% air by volume, making it the lightest solid known to humans!

Students learn how the heart functions. They are introduced to the concept of action potential generation, which causes the electrical current that triggers muscle contraction in the heart.

Students are introduced to an engineering challenge in which they are given a job assignment to separate three types of apples. However, they are unable to see the color differences between the apples, and as a result, they must think as engineers to design devices that can be used to help them dist...

Students learn about glaucoma—its causes, how it affects individuals and how biomedical engineers can identify factors that trigger or cause this eye disease, specifically the increase of pressure in the eye. Students sketch their own designs for a pressure-measuring eye device, prepare them to cond...

Students learn vocabulary necessary for understanding how ultrasonic waves are reflected and refracted. Students also see how ultrasound technology is used in medical devices.

Students learn about ultrasound and how it can be used to determine the shapes and contours of unseen objects. Using a one-dimensional ultrasound imaging device (either prepared by the teacher or put together by the students) that incorporates a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 intelligent brick and ultrasonic...

Students learn about the types of waves and how they change direction, as well as basic wave properties such as wavelength, frequency, amplitude and speed. During the presentation of lecture information on wave characteristics and properties, students take notes using a handout.