Pumps are used to get drinking water to our houses every day! And in disaster situations, pumps are essential to keep flood water out. In this hands-on activity, student groups design, build, test and improve devices to pump water as if they were engineers helping a rural village meet their drinking water supply. Students keep track of their materials costs, and calculate power and cost efficiencies of the prototype pumps. They also learn about different types of pumps, how they work and useful applications.

Adult education classrooms are commonly comprised of learners who have widely disparate levels of mathematical problem-solving skills. This is true regardless of what level a student may be assessed at when entering an adult education program or what level class they are placed in. Providing students with differentiated instruction in the form of Push and Support cards is one way to level this imbalance, keeping all students engaged in one high-cognitive task that supports and encourages learners who are stuck, while at the same time, providing extensions for students who move through the initial phase of the task quickly. Thus, all
students are continually moving forward during the activity, and when the task ends, all students have made progress in their journey towards developing conceptual understanding of mathematical ideas along with a productive disposition, belief in one’s own ability to successfully engage with mathematics.

In this hands-on activity rolling a ball down an incline and having it collide into a cup the concepts of mechanical energy, work and power, momentum, and friction are all demonstrated. During the activity, students take measurements and use equations that describe these energy of motion concepts to calculate unknown variables and review the relationships between these concepts.

Students use their understanding of projectile physics and fluid dynamics to find the water pressure in water guns. By measuring the range of the water jets, they are able to calculate the theoretical pressure. Students create graphs to analyze how the predicted pressure relates to the number of times they pump the water gun before shooting.

Represent inequalities on a number line.
Represent inequalities using interval notation.
Use the addition and multiplication properties to solve algebraic inequalities and express their solutions graphically and with interval notation.
Solve inequalities that contain absolute values.
Combine properties of inequalities to isolate variables, solve algebraic inequalities, and express their solutions graphically.
Simplify and solve algebraic inequalities using the distributive property to clear parentheses and fractions.

This activity allows students to practice solving one and two step equations by using an interactive tool teaching zero pairs to eliminate constant values and division and mulitplication properties to eliminate coefficient values.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to solve quadratics in one variable. In particular, the lesson will help teachers identify and help students who have the following difficulties: making sense of a real life situation and deciding on the math to apply to the problem; solving quadratic equations by taking square roots, completing the square, using the quadratic formula, and factoring; and interpreting results in the context of a real life situation.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: recognize the differences between equations and identities; substitute numbers into algebraic statements in order to test their validity in special cases; resist common errors when manipulating expressions such as 2(x Đ 3) = 2x Đ 3; (x + 3)_ = x_ + 3_; and carry out correct algebraic manipulations. It also aims to encourage discussion on some common misconceptions about algebra.

The Tippy Tap hand-washing station is an inexpensive and effective device used extensively in the developing world. One shortcoming of the homemade device is that it must be manually refilled with water and therefore is of limited use in high-traffic areas. In this activity, student teams design, prototype and test piping systems to transport water from a storage tank to an existing Tippy Tap hand-washing station, thereby creating a more efficient hand-washing station. Through this example service-learning engineering project, students learn basic fluid dynamic principles that are needed for creating efficient piping systems.

Students measure the wavelength of sounds and learn basic vocabulary associated with waves. As a class, they brainstorm the difference between two tuning forks and the sounds they produce. Then they come up with a way to measure that difference. Using a pipe in a graduated cylinder filled with water, students measure the wavelength of various tuning forks by finding the height the pipe must be held at to produce the loudest note. After calculating the wavelength and comparing it to the pitch of each tuning fork, students discover the relationship between wavelength and pitch.

Students use conductivity meters to measure various salt and water solutions, as indicated by the number of LEDs (light emitting diodes) that illuminate on the meter. Students create calibration curves using known amounts of table salt dissolved in water and their corresponding conductivity readings. Using their calibration curves, students estimate the total equivalent amount of salt contained in Gatorade (or other sports drinks and/or unknown salt solutions). This activity reinforces electrical engineering concepts, such as the relationship between electrical potential, current and resistance, as well as the typical circuitry components that represent these phenomena. The concept of conductors is extended to ions that are dissolved in solution to illustrate why electrolytic solutions support the passage of currents.