How can you tell if harmful bacteria are in your food or water that might make you sick? What you eat or drink can be contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites and toxins—pathogens that can be harmful or even fatal. Students learn which contaminants have the greatest health risks and how they enter the food supply. While food supply contaminants can be identified from cultures grown in labs, bioengineers are creating technologies to make the detection of contaminated food quicker, easier and more effective.

This lesson begins with a demonstration prompting students to consider how current generates a magnetic field and the direction of the field that is generated. Through formal lecture, students learn Biot-Savart's law in order to calculate, most simply, the magnetic field produced in the center of a circular current carrying loop. For applications, students find it is necessary to integrate the field produced over all small segments in an actual current carrying wire.

This materials have been compiled to support an introductory Biotechnology course for high school students.

This five-part lesson plan for middle school science classrooms is designed for exploration and learning about the impacts of light pollution on migratory birds in Connecticut. Light pollution negatively affects many species of migratory birds that fly through Connecticut, especially migratory songbirds.

The learning module equips learners with the necessary skills and knowledge to extend their understanding of light pollution and its effects on migratory bird populations as an unintended consequence of human development. It identifies specific learning goals, objectives, and activities for students, providing both direction and pace for the learning process. It also serves as a roadmap for educators with sequential learning objectives and thoughtful handout materials.

This curriculum was designed by Catherine Ferreri, a sixth-grade science teacher at Coleytown Middle School, in Westport, CT, who has a background in biology and the environment. Meredith Barges, a bird-friendly building expert and co-chair of Lights Out Connecticut, collaborated on the development and design of the project. The project was funded by the Hartford Audubon Society and individual donors to Lights Out Connecticut.

Educators who wish to adapt the curriculum for their students and classroom goals are encouraged to download the PDF as a word-processing document and make modifications directly to the main document and handout materials.

It is hoped that by increasing learning and engagement by young people about bird migration—and the challenges migratory birds face as a result of light pollution—will inspire greater care for migratory birds and meaningful, lasting change.

In this activity, students construct "flying birds" (pollution collectors) from paper and wire hangers. Students hang up their birds to see how they react to air pollution, and compare and make observations about the differences in the birds.

This sequence of instruction was developed to help elementary teachers who were working remotely.  We developed a short storyline that ties together a few sessions to help explore a specific concept.  We tried to include some activities that honored and included the student’s family and experience, and some that included the potential for ELA learning goals.Students make observations of the behaviors while watching short videos of Bald Eagles and Hummingbirds.  They then make observations of birds in their own neighborhood or school grounds.  They use these observations to explore th knees of these organisms and behaviors used to meet these needs.It is part of Clime Time - a collaboration among all nine Educational Service Districts (ESDs) in Washington and many Community Partners to provide programs for science teacher training around Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and climate science, thanks to grant money made available to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) by Governor Inslee. 

In this series of activities students investigate the effects of black carbon on snow and ice melt in the Arctic. The lesson begins with an activity that introduces students to the concept of thermal energy and how light and dark surfaces reflect and absorb radiant energy differently. To help quantify the relationship between carbon and ice melt, the wet lab activity has students create ice samples both with and without black carbon and then compare how they respond to radiant energy while considering implications for the Arctic.

How does the blackbody spectrum of the sun compare to visible light? Learn about the blackbody spectrum of the sun, a light bulb, an oven, and the earth. Adjust the temperature to see the wavelength and intensity of the spectrum change. View the color of the peak of the spectral curve.

Rockets need a lot of thrust to get into space. In this lesson, students learn how rocket thrust is generated with propellant. The two types of propellants are discussed and relation to their use on rockets is investigated. Students learn why engineers need to know the different properties of propellants.

Students are introduced to our Sun as they explore its composition, what is happening inside it, its relationship to our planet (our energy source), and the ways engineers help us learn about it.

Students are introduced to the circulatory system with an emphasis on the blood clotting process, including coagulation and the formation and degradation of polymers through their underlying atomic properties. They learn about the medical emergency of strokes the loss of brain function commonly due to blood clots including various causes and the different effects depending on the brain location, as well as blood clot removal devices designed by biomedical engineers.

Students make a skydiver and parachute contraption to demonstrate how drag caused by air resistance slows the descent of skydivers as they travel back to Earth. Gravity pulls the skydiver toward the Earth, while the air trapped by the parachute provides an upward resisting force (drag) on the skydiver.

In this video, Jonathan joins Charlie Donilon on his shark charter boat in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and learns about how shark tagging has shed light on the biology of and behavior of Blue sharks. Tagging has shown that these incredible swimmers actually migrate completely across the Atlantic ocean. Jonathan tries his hand at tagging a shark and then swims with Blue sharks. We also learn that Blue sharks are not nearly as vicious as they have been reputed to be, and the divers are actually able to pet the sharks! Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

Students are introduced to the circulatory system, the heart, and blood flow in the human body. Through guided pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading activities, students learn about the circulatory system's parts, functions and disorders, as well as engineering medical solutions. By cultivating literacy practices as presented in this lesson, students can improve their scientific and technological literacy.

Throughout the day, your nervous system monitors and makes endless adjustments to your body's basic systems -- all to keep you alive. This interactive feature illustrates the complexity of such a task.

Students learn about various crystals, such as kidney stones, within the human body. They also learn about how crystals grow and ways to inhibit their growth. They also learn how researchers such as chemical engineers design drugs with the intent to inhibit crystal growth for medical treatment purposes and the factors they face when attempting to implement their designs. A day before presenting this lesson to students, conduct the associated activity, Rock Candy Your Body.

In the Body System Amusement Parks project, students team up to create amusement parks based on the various systems and organs within the human body. With the power of abstraction, each attraction represents the cardiovascular system, the muscular system, the digestive system, etc. Teams create both 3D scale models and presentations to an unnamed wealthy investment firm looking to build a new park in the students’ very own town. This activity was heavily inspired by a post from Danielle Dace.

Students will explore the impact of space travel on the human body and ways NASA equips their astronauts to live in this environment.

This rubric will help assess student designs for technology to help lessen the effects of one of the health problems associated with sending people into space.

Students design and build devices to protect and accurately deliver dropped eggs. The devices and their contents represent care packages that must be safely delivered to people in a disaster area with no road access. Similar to engineering design teams, students design their devices using a number of requirements and constraints such as limited supplies and time. The activity emphasizes the change from potential energy to kinetic energy of the devices and their contents and the energy transfer that occurs on impact. Students enjoy this competitive challenge as they attain a deeper understanding of mechanical energy concepts.