This is a highly adaptable outline for how design thinking could be introduced to your learners over a multi-day project. This plan works best if students are divided up into groups of 3-4 for all work except the introduction to each concept at the beginning of class. Learners should stay in the same group for the whole class.

Includes pre-work links, general instructions to guide planning for each day, design thinking student handouts, and multi-grade NGSS standards linked to design thinking.

After a discussion about what a parachute is and how it works, students create parachutes using different materials that they think will work best. They test their designs, and then contribute to a class discussion (and possible journal writing) to report which paper materials worked best.

This is a STEM activity to learn how different colors absorb light better than others. Vocabulary and investigating questions are included to facilitate discussion, and a rubric is provided for assessment.

Students gain an understanding of the factors that affect wind turbine operation. Following the steps of the engineering design process, engineering teams use simple materials (cardboard and wooden dowels) to build and test their own turbine blade prototypes with the objective of maximizing electrical power output for a hypothetical situation—helping scientists power their electrical devices while doing research on a remote island. Teams explore how blade size, shape, weight and rotation interact to achieve maximal performance, and relate the power generated to energy consumed on a scale that is relevant to them in daily life. A PowerPoint® presentation, worksheet and post-activity test are provided.

Students gain a basic understanding of the properties of media soil, sand, compost, gravel and how these materials affect the movement of water (infiltration/percolation) into and below the surface of the ground. They learn about permeability, porosity, particle size, surface area, capillary action, storage capacity and field capacity, and how the characteristics of the materials that compose the media layer ultimately affect the recharging of groundwater tables. They test each type of material, determining storage capacity, field capacity and infiltration rates, seeing the effect of media size on infiltration rate and storage. Then teams apply the testing results to the design their own material mixes that best meet the design requirements. To conclude, they talk about how engineers apply what students learned in the activity about the infiltration rates of different soil materials to the design of stormwater management systems.

Students learn about the engineering design process and how it is used to engineer products for everyday use. Students individually brainstorm solutions for sorting coins and draw at least two design ideas. They work in small groups to combine ideas and build a coin sorter using common construction materials such as cardboard, tape, straws and fabric. Students test their coin sorters, make revisions and suggest ways to improve their designs. By designing, building, testing and improving coin sorters, students come to understand how the engineering design process is used to engineer products that benefit society.

Students analyze an assortment of popular inventions to determine whom they are intended to benefit, who has access to them, who might be harmed by them, and who is profiting by them. Then they re-imagine the devices in a way that they believe would do more good for humanity. During the first 90-minute class period, they evaluate and discuss designs in small groups and as a class, examining their decision-making criteria. Collectively, they decide upon a definition of "ethical" that they use going forward. During the second period, students apply their new point-of-view to redesign popular inventions (on paper) and persuasively present them to the class, explaining how they meet the class standards for ethical designs. Two PowerPoint® presentations, a worksheet and grading rubric are provided.

Students build small-sized prototypes of mountain rescue litters rescue baskets for use in hard-to-get-to places, such as mountainous terrain to evacuate an injured person (modeled by a potato) from the backcountry. Groups design their litters within constraints: they must be stable, lightweight, low-cost, portable and quick to assemble. Students demonstrate their designs in a timed test during which they assemble the litter and transport the rescued person (potato) over a set distance.

In Unit 2 of the Explore the Salish Sea curriculum, students will review the water cycle, learn the parts of a watershed, and the effects of erosion and pollution, then learn ways of purifying these waters before they enter our streams and estuaries to safeguard these ecosystems for marine life and us.
Each unit in this series contains a detailed unit plan, a slideshow, student journal, and assessments. All elements are adaptable and can be tailored to your local community.

The moon is more explored than the ocean, and that includes the Salish Sea. Where it is inconvenient or even impossible for people to go, we can engineer technology to go there for us, like the Mars Rovers, space probes, automatic unmanned vehicles, drones, and in this unit, remotely operated vehicles (ROV’s). Ocean Tech revisits the engineering process, but this time it requires physical, mechanical, and electrical engineers working together as a team to achieve a student-driven mission.

Chapter 5, Life in the Deep: The Subtidal World, is our first look into the amazing life forms that live their whole lives underwater. Is there access to the subtidal world near your school? If you can get to one (even if it is a pond or a pool), your students’ engineering efforts will find their reward. What mystery or problem will your students explore with their own ROV? Dive in!

A gear is a simple machine that is very useful to increase the speed or torque of a wheel. In this activity, students learn about the trade-off between speed and torque when designing gear ratios. The activity setup includes a LEGO(TM) MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT pulley system with two independent gear sets and motors that spin two pulleys. Each pulley has weights attached by string. In a teacher demonstration, the effect of adding increasing amounts of weight to the pulley systems with different gear ratios is observed as the system's ability to lift the weights is tested. Then student teams are challenged to design a gear set that will lift a given load as quickly as possible. They test and refine their designs to find the ideal gear ratio, one that provides enough torque to lift the weight while still achieving the fastest speed possible.

Students are going to be working in an Engineering Design team to create a car using K’Nex pieces. They will work through 3 iterations of design in a goal to have their car travel 600 CM. They will use a ramp (defined in the lesson) to have their car gain momentum. They will also create a 3D Printed wheel to be attached to their design and determine if this has improved their design.

Teacher/Student Guide
Links to 3D Design Videos
Project Rubric

Students are going to be working in an Engineering Design team to create a car using K’Nex pieces. They will work through 3 iterations of design in a goal to have their car travel 600 CM. They will use a ramp (defined in the lesson) to have their car gain momentum. They will also create a 3D Printed wheel to be attached to their design and determine if this has improved their design.

Teacher/Student Guide
Links to 3D Design Videos
Project Rubric

In conjunction with a synchronous presentation, this course supports middle school educators in developing lessons for incorporating green chemistry and sustainable design into their classroom teaching.  The course explores a variety of topics and resources, providing many links to freely available curriculum and resources. 

Build your own miniature "greenhouse" out of a plastic container and plastic wrap, and fill it with different things such as dirt and sand to observe the effect this has on temperature. Monitor the temperature using temperature probes and digitally plot the data on the graphs provided in the activity.

Make your own miniature greenhouse and measure the light levels at different "times of day"--modeled by changing the angle of a lamp on the greenhouse--using a light sensor. Next, investigate the temperature in your greenhouse with and without a cover. Learn how a greenhouse works and how you can regulate the temperature in your model greenhouse.

Students are presented with a guide to rain garden construction in an activity that culminates the unit and pulls together what they have learned and prepared in materials during the three previous associated activities. They learn about the four vertical zones that make up a typical rain garden with the purpose to cultivate natural infiltration of stormwater. Student groups create personal rain gardens planted with native species that can be installed on the school campus, within the surrounding community, or at students' homes to provide a green infrastructure and low-impact development technology solution for areas with poor drainage that often flood during storm events.

Students engage in the second design challenge of the unit, which is an extension of the maze challenge they solved in the first lesson/activity of this unit. Students extend the ideas learned in the maze challenge with a focus more on the robot design. Gears are a very important part of any machine, particularly when it has a power source such as engine or motor. Specifically, students learn how to design the gear train from the LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT servomotor to the wheel to make the LEGO taskbot go faster or slower. A PowerPoint® presentation, pre/post quizzes and a worksheet are provided.

Students learn how to program using loops and switches. They see how loops enable us to easily and efficiently tell a computer to keep repeating an operation. They also see that switches permit programs to follow different instructions based on whether or not preconditions are fulfilled. Using the LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT robots, sensors and software, student pairs perform three mini programming activities using loops and switches individually, and then combined. With practice, they incorporate these tools into their programming skill sets in preparation for the associated activity. A PowerPoint® presentation, pre/post quizzes and worksheet are provided.

Building on the programming basics learned so far in the unit, students next learn how to program using sensors rather than by specifying exact durations. They start with an examination of algorithms and move to an understanding of conditional commands (until, then), which require the use of wait blocks. Working with the LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT robots and software, they learn about wait blocks and how to use them in conjunction with move blocks set with unlimited duration. To help with comprehension and prepare them for the associated activity programming challenges, volunteer students act out a maze demo and student groups conclude by programming LEGO robots to navigate a simple maze using wait block programming. A PowerPoint® presentation, a worksheet and pre/post quizzes are provided.