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.
For all ages we created a lab activity to focus on a new type of biofuel grown from algae. In this activity the class will make and grow their own algae as instructed in the video below. This algae will then be extracted to show students how much oil can be produced from such a small sample. This will allow students to compare this biofuels to others they have seen in the past.
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!
Do you ever need to boost the energy of your club group? Want to build your group’s teamwork in fun, interactive ways? Check out these team-building activities and icebreakers to make your club meetings more exciting and engaging! Click here to access the activities.
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:
Last teacher workshop we previewed awesome middle school and high school bioenergy textbooks from Facing the Future. These books are filled with activities including Sustainable Flight in the Pacific Northwest, which is a great real life example. In this activity students will research different biofuels and decide which one is best suited to be mixed with jet fuel. They will then trace the production process and explore stakeholder’s positions with their classmates. Collectively classmates must come up with a new jet fuel policy that satisfies all of their stakeholders. This activity encourages healthy debate and will allow students to act as policy makers. We will be handing out the Facing the Future textbooks during the teacher workshop and we encourage you to check out their other amazing activities.
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!
