Powering the U.S.
This lesson provides students with an overview of the electric power industry in the United States. Students also become familiar with the environmental impacts associated with a variety of energy sources.
Naturally Disastrous
Students are introduced to natural disasters, and learn the difference between natural hazards and natural disasters. They discover the many types of natural hazards — avalanche, earthquake, flood, forest fire, hurricane, landslide, thunderstorm, tornado, tsunami and volcano — as well as specific examples of natural disasters. Students also explore why understanding these natural events is important to engineers and everyone’s survival on our planet.
Using Spectral Data to Explore Saturn and Titan
Students use authentic spectral data from the Cassini mission of Saturn and Saturn’s moon, Titan, gathered by instrumentation developed by engineers. Taking these unknown data, and comparing it with known data, students determine the chemical composition of Saturn’s rings and Titan’s atmosphere.
Cost Comparisons
Students learn about the many types of expenses associated with building a bridge. Working like engineers, they estimate the cost for materials for a bridge member of varying sizes. After making calculations, they graph their results to compare how costs change depending on the use of different materials (steel vs. concrete). They conclude by creating a proposal for a city bridge design based on their findings.
Windstorm
In this activity, students will learn about how tornadoes are formed and what they look like. By creating a water vortex in a soda bottle, they will get a first-hand look at tornadoes.
Build it Better!
Students use their knowledge of tornadoes and damage. The students will work in groups to design a structure that will withstand and protect people from tornadoes. Each group will create a poster with the name of their engineering firm and a picture of their structure. Finally, each group will present their posters to the class.
Bombs Away!
Students will design and build a device to protect and accurately deliver a dropped egg. The device and its contents represent a care package that must be safely delivered to people in a disaster area with no road access. In a similar fashion to a team of design engineers, students will design their devices using a number of design constraints including limited supplies. The activity emphasizes the change from potential energy to kinetic energy of the device and its contents and the energy trans
Floaters and Sinkers
This curricular unit introduces students to the important concept of density. The focus is on the more easily understood densities of solids, but students can also explore the densities of liquids and gases. Students devise methods to determine the densities of solid objects, including the method of water displacement to determine volumes of irregularly-shaped objects. By comparing densities of various solids to the density of water, and by considering the behavior of different solids when place
Lost in the Amazon
The Lost in the Amazon curricular unit is a series of minds-on and hands-on engineering activities based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Motivated by an adventurous theme, students discover, learn and apply the following: 1) Classification of Plants and Insects; 2) General Categorizing Skills; 3) Process Skills: Problem Solving and Critical Thinking; 4) Scientific Testing and Experimentation; 5) Properties of Materials The investigative, exploratory and problem solving nature of Lost in the
Straining out the Dirt
In this activity, students build a water filter with activated carbon, cotton and other materials to remove chocolate powder from water.
Improving West Corridor Design
This lesson uses the FasTracks Living Lab, a web portal to interactive train (transit) traffic data for a major metropolitan city. In this lesson, students will first evaluate whether a particular section of the transit system is functioning in an efficient manner and whether it is meeting design requirements. Then, students will suggest design improvements and evaluate whether they make a positive impact on the performance of the transit system. Throughout this lesson, students will work with r
2.1.1 What's ‘Buy It Now’?
Online shopping – think of it as a shopping centre in cyberspace, with online auctions as the car-boot sale in the car park. This unit will help you understand how to use online shopping sites, how to ensure that you are using the best sites and the best ways to protect your security.
Launching a new venture 4.2.1 ATM physical layer The ATM physical layer is divided into two sub-layers: the transmission convergence sub-layer and the physical medium sub-layer. Functions of the transmission convergence sub-layer include generating and receiving cells, and generating and verifying the cyclic redundancy check in the header error control field. For correct interpretation of ATM cells it is important to identify the beginning of a cell. In theory, if ATM cells are transmitted as a continuous stream of bits, Discovering Properties of Matter How Lead Batteries are Made NMR tutorial 3 Work on your own mathematics 2 Your own mathematics 1 Forces for development
What strategies can entrepreneurs adopt to help them weather the current economic storm? John Mullins, Associate Professor of Management Practice, has researched entrepreneurial ventures and offers some valuable insights
What is matter? How do we define it? What are some of its properties that we can measure? Come learn all about this fundamental piece of science in this Wowie clip from the Children's Museum of Houston. Cynthia briefly discusses the following properties of matter: shape, texture, magnetism, fluorescence, and mass. (0:59)
Batteries are great examples of chemical potential energy, energy that is stored up. Find out how lead batteries are made and what causes the chemical reaction as we take a trip to the Superior Battery Manufacturing Company on Discovery Channel's "HowStuffWorks" show. (02:49)
The introduction to this site provides an entry-level introductions to NMR in a text + figures format. The site also contains two example structure elucidation problems using NMR. IR and MS data complete with hints and answers. Although the molecules are pretty simple, the examples do a good job of illustrating the structure elucidation process. The site also has data for 5 more complex structure determination problems.
This unit focuses on your initial encounters with research. It invites you to think about how perceptions of mathematics have influenced you in your prior learning, your teaching and the attitudes of learners.
This unit focuses on your initial encounters with research. It invites you to think about how perceptions of mathematics have influenced you in your prior learning, your teaching and the attitudes of learners.
This unit focuses on your initial encounters with research. It invites you to think about how perceptions of mathematics have influenced you in your prior learning, your teaching and the attitudes of learners.













