During this winter and summer teacher’s workshop, our industrial engineering team made several fun LEGO activities for your students. They have created even more activities that they wanted to share. All of the activities from the other team is posted below:
During this winter and summer teacher’s workshop, our industrial engineering team made several fun LEGO activities for your students. They have created even more activities that they wanted to share. All of the activities from one of our teams is posted below:
Scientists and teachers are trying to find ways to make engineering design easier for students to understand. Some students have a difficult time understanding how engineering is different than science. They also struggle making engineering design more than tinkering. The Boston Museum of Science has developed a simple design process that makes engineering understandable to students. It consists of five steps that help students know what to do at each stage of the cycle: ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve. We will discuss the design process at the teacher workshop and hope that it will engineering activities easier to manage and understand.
Recently White City, Oregon has been experiencing a problem and we can help them. They have a pile of wood chips that covers 6 acres to a height of 40 feet that has the tendency to spontaneously ignite during the hot summers – threatening nearby homes and blanketing the town in smoke for days. This town is the environment in four additional activities for the teacher workshop. The town creates a nice motivation for students to design bioenergy power plants. If they can figure out a way to use the wood chips to generate power and use the energy stored in the wood chips everybody wins.
Hydraulic systems are an important mechanical component of a lot of our daily lives! In this activity, students will brainstorm and build a functional mechanical arm that uses hydraulic systems to perform different tasks. Click here for the lesson plan. Happy inventing!
Here’s another awesome activity that we’ll be presenting at our Teachers’ Workshop next week! This is a really fun activity in which students use film canisters to create rockets. Click here to access the lesson plan.
On Ellen’s talkshow, she set off 3,000 film canisters rockets at once! Check it out here:
We did not forget about our middle school students. We wanted them to have a fun game as well and we made one with help from PBS SciGirls. This game was modified so that students could test their bioenergy knowledge. As the name suggests students will be quizzed on bioenergy based science, technology, engineering, and math questions. The questions are meant to get kids moving and using their creativity skills. Check it out!
Teachers, the Middle School Challenge is just around the corner! Last term we learned some important lessons from our Mechanical Engineering Team that has hopefully helped your students construct a cable car. We hope that you pass these lessons along to your students so that we can have a successful Middle School Challenge. Here is a list of what you need to do before the challenge.
1) Make sure your students check out the videos we have been posting and do some research on cable car designs.
2) Make sure they have read and understand the requirements for the cable car. Feel free to post any questions.
3) Have your students make at least one club cable car to share at the Middle School Challenge. This car will need to be completed before the challenge as we will be doing a LEGO based industrial and manufacturing engineering challenge.
4) Come to the Middle School Challenge ready share and test your cable car! We look forward to seeing you at Eastern Oregon University on April 26th, or Portland Community College on May 3rd, or Southern Oregon University on May 10th.
Again if you have any questions please post them in the comments or contact us directly through email.
