Students explore the inhalation/exhalation process that occurs in the lungs during respiration. Using everyday materials, each student team creates a model pair of lungs.

This lesson helps students explore the functions of the kidney and its place in the urinary system. Students learn how engineers design instruments to help people when kidneys are not functioning properly or when environmental conditions change, such as kidney function in space.

Our planet is precious. Connecting to our world and becoming aware of our surroundings and ways we can keep Earth beautiful can be empowering to students and adults alike! Our goal with this project is to encourage and empower students to reduce waste in our classrooms, our school, our community and beyond!

Student teams design insulated beverage bottles with the challenge to test them to determine which materials (and material thicknesses) work best at insulating hot water to keep it warm for as long as possible. Students test and compare their designs in still air and under a stream of moving air from a house fan.

We have been rearing salmon in our classroom for a long time, and the students love it. The project before this point was very teacher lead and much of the care, and set up was done for the students. We are excited to make a student-led project based unit that will better cover the content and incorporate the standards we are looking to teach.

In this lesson, students develop an understanding of the critical role communication plays in an engineer's life. Students create products to communicate their learning about the engineering role in the environment.

How do we communicate with each other? How do we communicate with people who are close by? How do we communicate with people who are far away? In this lesson, students will explore the role of communications and how satellites help people communicate with others far away and in remote areas with nothing around (i.e., no obvious telecommunications equipment). Students will learn about how engineers design satellites to benefit life on Earth. This lesson also introduces the theme of the rockets curricular unit.

Consistent housing is a continual issue for our community, evidence of this is readily observable in the neighborhoods surrounding our classrooms. Over the course of 15 classroom hours, students will be exploring how they can insulate structures to protect from extreme hot and extreme cold using recycled and/or repurposed materials.

Students will make observations and collect data related to temperature. Student findings will be communicated through science journals, student generated models (charts, 3D structures, drawings, etc.).

In this activity, students filter different substances through a plastic window screen, different sized hardware cloth and poultry netting. Their model shows how the thickness of a filter in the kidney is imperative in deciding what will be filtered out and what will stay within the blood stream.

Compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object and determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.

Driving Question: Can I as “Science Investigator”, engineer and design,
a way to move an object without using my hands or feet?

Play a question and answer card game on the solar system and learn about the properties of the Sun and its planets.

Students use a LEGO® ball shooter to demonstrate and analyze the motion of a projectile through use of a line graph. This activity involves using a method of data organization and trend observation with respect to dynamic experimentation with a complex machine. Also, the topic of line data graphing is covered. The main objective is to introduce students graphs in terms of observing and demonstrating their usefulness in scientific and engineering inquiries. During the activity, students point out trends in the data and the overall relationship that can be deduced from plotting data derived from test trials with the ball shooter.

This lesson focuses on the importance of airplanes in today's society. Airplanes of all shapes and sizes are used for hundreds of different reasons, including recreation, commercial business, public transportation, and delivery of goods, among many others. From transporting people to crop-dusting, our society and our economy have come to depend on airplanes. Students will discuss their own experiences with airplanes and learn more about the role of airplanes in our world.

Waste disposal has been an ongoing problem since medieval times. Environmental engineers are employed to develop technologies to dispose of the enormous amount of trash produced in the United States. In this lesson, students will learn about the three methods of waste disposal in use by modern communities. They will also investigate how engineers design sanitary landfills to prevent leachate from polluting the underlining groundwater.

Students learn about landslides, discovering that there are different types of landslides that occur at different speeds from very slow to very quick. All landslides are the result of gravity, friction and the materials involved. Both natural and human-made factors contribute to landslides. Students learn what makes landslides dangerous and what engineers are doing to prevent and avoid landslides.

Students learn about catapults, including the science and math concepts behind them, as they prepare for the associated activity in which they design, build and test their own catapults. They learn about force, accuracy, precision and angles.

In this lesson, students discover the entire process that goes into designing a rocket for any customer. In prior lessons, students learned how rockets work, but now they learn what real-world decisions engineers have to make when designing and building a rocket. They learn about important factors such as supplies, ethics, deadlines and budgets. Also, students learn about the Engineering process, and recognize that the first design is almost never the final design. Re-Engineering is a critical step in creating a rocket.

Students experience a simulation of echolation, using the sensory method to walk along a path while blindfolded. This relates to the issue of bycatching by fisheries, which they learned about in the associated lesson. Bycatching affects marine animals, especially dolphins, which use echolocation to identify the location of objects in the water, but have difficulty identifying nets, and thus are often caught accidentally. Students learn how echolocation works, why certain animals use it to determine the size, shape and distance of objects, and how humans can potentially take advantage of dolphins' echolocation ability when developing bycatch avoidance methods.

Students observe and discuss a vacuum cleaner model of a baghouse to better understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.