Are brown paper packages tied up with strings always a favorite
thing? Not necessarily to packaging engineers! In this unit, students
encounter the rapidly growing field of package engineering. They
take a fresh look at the packaging they encounter daily--and often
toss out without appreciating its importance. As children investigate
the functions of packages, they discover the relationship between
the needs of the product (in this unit, a plant) and the functions that
must be considered in package design.
Ultimately, students design, test, and improve their own packages to solve a tricky challenge: carry a plant and keep it safe for several days--while also ensuring it has the light, air, and moisture it needs.
Hands-on activities, discussion, and reading focus on package engineering and the Engineering Design Process. Engineering concepts are introduced at a level appropriate for elementary students.
This unit guides students to think like mechanical engineers
as they use their knowledge of wind to design and create
machines that can be used to capture wind energy. The
storybook "Leif Catches the Wind" reinforces the science
concept of air as wind, and introduces the field of mechanical
engineering. The wind turbines found in Leif's home country,
Denmark, are used as an example of a renewable energy
source and a machine designed in part by mechanical engineers.
Students will then use their mechanical engineering skills to explore different materials and shapes conducive to catching the wind, for designing windmill blades.
This unit provides students with the opportunity to apply their
knowledge of organisms and their basic needs through a series
of activities related to the diverse field of bioengineering.
After reading the storybook "Juan Daniel's Fútbol Frog",students
learn to think like bioengineers, as they play a "concentration"
style card game and match technologies with their natural inspirations. Students are then challenged be bioengineers and design a model membrane that can deliver water to an imaginary pet frog in a controlled manner, helping the frog to meet one of its basic needs.
This unit guides students to learn about how factories
use processes, systems, and machines to help make
work easier and safer for workers. The storybook "Aisha
Makes Work Easier" - set in and around the U.S. city of
Boston, Massachusetts - as well as follow-up lessons
reinforce concepts about simple machines. Special
emphasis is given to the sometimes surprising settings in which we can find simple machines in our everyday world, as well as in a potato chip factory.
The lessons add depth to the notion that simple machines help make work easier, and also introduce the idea that different systems can help make work simpler. Students will compare individual craftsmanship to factory production, and explore the benefits and disadvantages of the assembly line as a production process. Students will measure the force required to complete a given task with and without simple machines, to understand the types of advantages simple machines offer. During the culminating design challenge, students will put their data to the test as they combine a series of simple machines to complete the various tasks of a model potato chip factory and make work easier.
This unit takes students to Nepal, where the real-life TarPul
Project (an Ecosystems, Ltd., project) helps ensure that
people in monsoon-prone areas don’t get stranded on one
side of a flooded river. After meeting storybook character
Suman, who worries about how his ailing grandmother will
receive health care from the clinic across the river when the
flood season comes, students appreciate how important it
is to find a safe, flood- and erosion-proof site for the innovative
Tarpul river-crossing cable system.
Digging into the role of geotechnical engineers, students use models to represent a larger, real-life riverbank system and see how different factors impact a TarPul. Students’ objective: Use the Engineering Design Process to select and recommend to villagers a TarPul site, even though each site has advantages and disadvantages based on several factors.
To meet the goal, students must run tests on the models to determine the ideal soil base for a TarPul site, explore the costs and benefits of changing the soil to make it more suitable for building, examine maps to consider various sites’ potentials for eroding in the next flood, and weigh the villagers’ traditional preferences for the Tarpul’s location. In the end, each student team must make a choice in the midst of some realistic ambiguity and justify its recommendations.
In this unit, students shape their understandings of sequenced
processes, the properties of solids and liquids, and some possible
outcomes of mixing the two, as they get serious about play dough.
Students follow in the skate steps of Michelle, the storybook’s
Canadian kid hockey-player turned junior-chemical engineer.
Michelle uses her knowledge of processes and play dough to
help her team raise money to see their favorite pro team play.
In the classroom, students tackle the challenge of creating the way to improve an “okay” play dough recipe. On the way, they explore the properties of a good dough and compare their own sample to it. Then they improve a standard process for mixing the ingredients--to ensure that it creates a just-right dough. Along they way, they discover that the process really can make the difference between a goopy blob and super sculpting medium.
This unit helps students to apply their knowledge of electricity,
circuits, conductors, and insulators as they design and
construct their own alarm circuits. The science concepts of
electricity/energy transfer, conductors and insulators, and
complete and incomplete circuits are reinforced and students
are also introduced to schematic diagrams, a symbol "language"
that electrical engineers use to plan and design circuits.
Through lessons and the unit's storybook, which takes place on a station (or ranch) in the Australian outback, students embark on an electricity scavenger hunt, practice drawing schematic diagrams from circuits, and finally design, create, and improve their own alarm circuits and switches to remind them when it is time to do an important chore.
This unit addresses the increasingly important issue of water quality
through lessons that teach students about water contamination and
the ways that people ensure the quality of their drinking water.
Students will first think like environmental engineers as they review
a mural of a small American community, noting possible sources of
pollution and suggesting ways to clean up or eliminate the source of
the pollution. Students will then focus on the environmental engineering problem of providing safe drinking water as they plan, construct, test, and improve their own water filters.
In Engineering School, students ages 9 to 12 are given a series of engineering design challenges that will foster their creativity and deepen their understanding of mathematics and science.
Students will develop their critical-thinking skills and learn the Engineering Design Process by creating prototypes that solve real-world problems in the areas of Agricultural, Biological, Chemical, Electrical, Environmental, Geotechnical, Industrial, Mechanical, Packaging, and Transportation engineering.
The wide variety of engineering design challenges range from determining the best process for creating play dough to ensuring the availability of safe drinking water by identifying ways to eliminate sources of pollution and designing and constructing water filters. Restricted to ages 9 to 12. Student must be able to work independently at a 3rd grade level for reading, writing and math.
FRC Members:
*$25 per student per class, if doing entire series.
$35 per student for **individual classes
Non Members:
*$50 per student per class, if doing entire series.
$60 per student for **individual classes
**Registering students for the entire series only until 9/1/09
*Monthly billing is available - additional $5 per month transaction fee will apply
Required Reading:
Students will be required to read the book that accompanies each class topic (see below). Each story features a child character from a different country. Throughout each book, the lead character is faced with a challenge in his or her own world or daily life that can be solved through engineering. After reading each book, students attend these educator-led classes to engineer their own solutions to the same design challenge. They are invited to apply their knowledge of science, engineering, and their problem solving skills, as they design, create, and improve possible solutions. Fee: $7 each, includes S&H.
The Attraction is Obvious: Designing Maglev Systems
Science Topic: Magnetism
Engineering Field: Transportation Engineering
Country: Japan
Storybook: Hikaru's Toy Troubles
In this unit, student understanding will rise to new heights as they
explore transportation engineering, magnetism, and the technological
innovation of the Magnetic Levitation train Following the lead of the
storybook characters--who need to attract customers to a family-owned
toy store before the business fails--students engineer a way to design a
levitating vehicle system that will carry packages without them touching
the ground.
In the classroom, students explore the science behind the magic-seeming
effect of MagLev. Students send magnets “sailing,” help magnets hover, and poke around magnetic poles. Creativity and excitement abound as children use their new insights and the Engineering Design Process to design, test, and improve their own tabletop MagLev transportation systems.
Deep in the rainforest of Ghana, young Kwame follows
his father's footsteps. His father is an acoustical engineer
working with research biologists who use sound to track
elephants' movements. Kwame, who is blind, journeys
with his father to check the technology used to record
the varied sounds of elephant life.
When Kwame "sees" how these elephant sounds are represented, he gets an idea that will help him solve his own problem: communicating his original drumming rhythm to his cousin in a far off village. Will Kwame be able to represent his rhythm so that he and his cousin can drum "as one" at the upcoming festival?
Readers are invited to create their own visual representations of a sound. With some creativity and knowledge of the engineering design process, everyone can engineer!
