Did you ever imagine that you can use light to move a microscopic plastic bead? Explore the forces on the bead or slow time to see the interaction with the laser's electric field. Use the optical tweezers to manipulate a single strand of DNA and explore the physics of tiny molecular motors. Can you get the DNA completely straight or stop the molecular motor?

Did you ever imagine that you can use light to move a microscopic plastic bead? Explore the forces on the bead or slow time to see the interaction with the laser's electric field. Use the optical tweezers to manipulate a single strand of DNA and explore the physics of tiny molecular motors. Can you get the DNA completely straight or stop the molecular motor?

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: interpret a situation and represent the constraints and variables mathematically; select appropriate mathematical methods to use; explore the effects of systematically varying the constraints; interpret and evaluate the data generated and identify the optimum case, checking it for confirmation; and communicate their reasoning clearly.

This lesson unit is intended to help sixth grade teachers assess how well students are able to: Analyze a realistic situation mathematically; construct sight lines to decide which areas of a room are visible or hidden from a camera; find and compare areas of triangles and quadrilaterals; and calculate and compare percentages and/or fractions of areas.

Based on this model oral history experience, the toolkit includes instructional concepts, ideas, and strategies for use by educators to design a curriculum that reflects their instructional goals and the needs of their students while appreciating Vietnam veterans in their community.

By researching these "ordinary" people and the now historic places where they brought about change, students will discover how the simple act of sitting at a lunch counter in North Carolina could be considered revolutionary, and how, combined with countless other acts of nonviolent protest across the nation, it could lead to major legislation in the area of civil rights for African Americans.

Students begin by exploring relevant vocabulary words. They then view a video about Jaylen Arnold, a young boy with Tourette syndrome, and how he has overcome bullying by children who did not understand his condition. Students will discuss Jaylen’s story and create posters to help communicate his message. They will then develop guidelines for how they can celebrate diversity and reduce bullying and share these guidelines with other classrooms.

Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Soviet leaders had been claiming that communism and capitalism could never peacefully coexist. Agreements regarding the postwar world were reached at Yalta and Potsdam, but the Soviets wasted no time in violating them. Harry Truman believed that the proper means of responding to an international bully was a credible threat of force.

This lesson helps students learn about the judicial system through simulating a real court case involving student free speech rights. In addition to learning about how the Supreme Court operates, students will explore how the Supreme Court protects their rights, interprets the Constitution, and works with the other two branches of government.

There are many who believe that "less is more" when it comes to using technology. This is the heart of the debate around recording vocals in music: how much manipulation is too much? If recording engineers and producers can use computers and software to digitally alter a vocal track, what happens to the original voice, and what role does talent play? To many, there is a fine line between the "perfection"that can be achieved with technology and the experience of "authenticity" in a recorded vocal performance. This lesson explores the ways in which music technology can enhance a singer's performance. It also considers the listener's interest in hearing the "authenticity" of a vocal performance. Either way, the heart of most popular music is the same, important center: the human voice.

As the lesson unfolds, students will get to investigate some of the ways listeners feel and relate to rhythms, focusing on the language used to describe "the beat," and the manners in which rhythms connect to a deeper past and seem to anticipate particular futures. If "the beat" was a concern in 1950s America, it was again a concern for some, decades later, when Gangsta Rap began to dominate the Billboard charts. How far have we come? And how can we study the past to learn more about the future we're making and the music we'll make it with? This lesson gets to the heart of the conflicts that arise as particular rhythms get made, released, listened to, and loved.

This lesson explores several strands of the musical "DNA" that make up the beat of popular music. Looking to the past, this lesson asks what it means to call music "Afro-Cuban" "Afro-Caribbean," or more broadly, "African-American." Students will use Soundbreakingclips of Santana and Beyonce and the Soundbreaking Rhythmic Layers TechTools to locate in American popular music influences stemming from the African-American church, Latin America and West Africa. Students will then explore the ways "the beat" of this music has, to some listeners, been perceived as "dangerous" while, for others, it is believed that music has been able to challenge obstacles of racism and segregation, bringing people from varied ethnic groups and lifestyles together in ways that words and laws could not.

In this lesson students explore the creative concepts and technological practices on which Hip Hop music was constructed, investigating what it means to "sample" from another style, who has used sampling and how. Then, students experience the technology first hand using the Soundbreaking Sampler TechTool. Students will follow patterns of Caribbean immigration and the musical practices that came to New York City as a result of those patterns, finally considering the ways in which Hip Hop reflects them. Moving forward to the late 1980s and early 90s, what some consider Hip Hop's "Golden Age," this lesson explores how sampling might demonstrate a powerful creative expression of influence or even a social or political statement. Finally, this lesson encourages students to consider the conceptual hurdle Hip Hop asked listeners to make by presenting new music made from old sounds.

In this lesson, students use examples from visual art as well as rap to enter into a "structured academic controversy" that explores the concept of originality.

The 24-hour-a-day music video programming of MTV gave musicians and their audiences a platform to fully explore the experience of sound and image. In this lesson, students will investigate the ways musicians used video before MTV, then consider how MTV changed the way artists have exploited the surprising territory where sound meets image.

In this lesson, students follow the life journey of Blues musician McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield, from his early beginnings in rural Mississippi to his music career in Chicago, Illinois. In learning about Waters' life, students consider the ways new environments might inspire people to express themselves in different ways. Students then reflect on ways new experiences might have spurred their own personal growth by creating a life roadmap.

This lesson explores the possibilities created by the new technology of cassettes and how people made use of them. In many ways, the digital future and its interactive possibilities were prefigured by the cassette era. By viewing and discussing clips from Soundbreaking Episode Eight, students learn how the Grateful Dead allowed their fans to tape their concerts and freely trade cassettes of their recordings, a move that helped establish the group as innovators in how bands cultivate relationships with their fanbase. Students will also consider how the cassette allowed individuals to express themselves through the selection, sequencing and re-packaging of commercially released music. In the last part of the lesson, they will look at the Sony Walkman and related devices, the first portable cassette players that led toward the current age of iPods, Mp3 players, and other forms of personal digital listening devices, exploring a period in which the boundaries between "consumer" and "producer," and "fan" and "participant" began to erode, allowing even the casual music fan a degree of access to the creative process.

In this lesson, Gospel music is used as a way to introduce students to the rhythmic concepts of beat, meter, backbeat, subdivision, and syncopation. By clapping and counting along to videos of Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Staple Singers, and Beyonce, students practice hearing and identifying these various aspects of rhythm. Students will also use an interactive TechTool to gain a deeper understanding of the syncopated rhythms that allows Gospel, as well a popular music in general, inspire us to move.

In this lesson, students investigate these questions by analyzing videos of dancing through the decades. With the help of a worksheet, student groups watch footage of the Charleston and Lindy Hop, the Mambo, "Love-in" dancing, Disco, and Break Dancing. Based on their informed observation of these styles, they then debate whether dance has "evolved" in American culture, or remained mostly the same.

Taking Sam Phillips as a case study, this lesson explores the role of the producer in the recording studio as one defined by an ability to guide the recording process but also to affect the wider cultural context. After investigating what a producer does and why an artist might benefit from a producer's services, this lesson looks at the way Sam Phillips' approach in some ways reflects the trend of urbanization in the American South. Like Phillips, many of his artists came from rural backgrounds and were seeking the benefits of urban life. That move toward the urban, and the racial mixing it fostered, was almost encoded in the music, as the lesson activities will illuminate. Finally, the lesson looks at Phillip's guidance of a young Elvis Presley and suggests how the music they produced created an opening for African-American music to "crossover" into mainstream American popular music.