In this video segment adapted from Design Squadí_í_íŹa PBS TV series featuring high school contestants tackling engineering challengesí_í_íŹstudents employ the concepts of tension and compression as they build a truss bridge without the aid of power tools.

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.

Students are tasked with designing a room of their choice in TinkerCAD. After learning the basic tools and navigation from modeling objects, they can begin to model collections of objects enabling them to visualize and personalize their dream spaces. Experimenting with layout, furniture, and décor helps develop their spatial awareness and design skills. The lesson concludes with an (optional) presentation, where participants present their room designs and reflect on their creative decisions and practical layouts. 

This activity was designed for blind learners, but all types of learners can use it to understand the design process and produce a design for a product meant to solve a specific problem.

In this video segment from Cyberchase, the CyberSquad designs an invention that will help them cross a swamp and also reach the top of a tall cliff.

The course considers the growing popularity of sustainability and its implications for the practice of engineering, particularly for the built environment. Two particular methodologies are featured: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The fundamentals of each approach will be presented. Specific topics covered include water and wastewater management, energy use, material selection, and construction.

In the aluminum foil boats challenge, elementary students learn about buoyancy by creating boats from aluminum foil. They experiment with different shapes to see which can hold the most weight before sinking. This fun activity teaches them about balance and how things float. The lesson ends with a competition, where students add weights to their boats and discover which designs work best.

Students learn about the types of possible loads, how to calculate ultimate load combinations, and investigate the different sizes for the beams (girders) and columns (piers) of simple bridge design. Students learn the steps that engineers use to design bridges: understanding the problem, determining the potential bridge loads, calculating the highest possible load, and calculating the amount of material needed to resist the loads.

Learn about types and sources of industrial emissions and tools to mitigate them. Learn what the options are for climate-neutral electricity and review the strategies for dealing with the variability of renewable energy.

This course is designed for the next generation of policy-makers, sustainability consultants or professionals and students from various fields who want an overview of climate change mitigation strategies in industry and electricity generation and apply them to their own projects.

This course covers a wide variety of topics in the industry and electricity generation domains, from the current situation to the challenging mission of becoming climate-neutral. Specifically:

Industry – You will learn about types and sources of industrial emissions. You will also learn about the existing technological options, methodologies and tools to mitigate emissions (mainly GHG) inside and outside the boundaries of the industrial plant.
Electricity generation – you will learn what the options are for climate-neutral electricity and review the strategies for dealing with the variability of renewable energy, as well as how energy system modeling is used to devise plans and policies for the energy transition.
The course includes videos, examples, interviews with experts, exercises and quizzes so that you can master and practice what you have learnt and explore mitigation strategies through real life examples. Enriched by relevant readings and discussion forums, this course will let you dive deeper into specific areas of interest you might have and further facilitate your learning experience.

Course material and exercises will be complemented by relevant content about policy, through which you will also discover current measures taken by governments world-wide.

Familiarize yourself with decarbonization measures in the building and transport sectors. Learn about trends in energy usage, carbon intensity, and potential of available alternatives to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

This course is designed for the next generation of policy makers, sustainability consultants or professionals and students from other fields who want to introduce themselves to climate change mitigation strategies in the building and transport sectors and apply them to their projects.

This course covers a wide variety of topics in the building and transportation domains, with the focus on the importance of designing climate friendly systems. Specifically:

Buildings – you will learn about trends in energy use and CO2 emissions that result from heating and cooling buildings, cooking and the use of electricity for appliances and lighting. You will be able to compare various alternatives to limit GHG emissions from buildings and quantify their impact.
Transportation – you will gain knowledge of decarbonization efforts carried out in various sub-sectors of transportation (including freight, aviation and passenger transport). You will learn about trends, fuel alternatives such as electrification and hydrogen applications, examine energy intensity and calculate GHG produced by transport. Additionally, you will have the chance to evaluate different transportation modes and their impact on climate.
In addition to the lectures, the course also includes interviews with experts and various exercises that will demonstrate how to practice what you have learnt and explore GHG emissions through real life examples. Enriched by relevant readings and discussion forums, this course will let you dive deeper into specific areas of interest you might have and further facilitate your learning experience.

Course material and exercises will be complemented by relevant content about policy, through which you will also discover current measures taken by governments world-wide.

What You'll Learn:
Understand the big picture of how buildings contribute to global GHG emissions and differences between climate zones.
Analyze the contribution of heating, cooling, cooking, and use of electrical appliances to greenhouse gas emissions and examine options to mitigate CO2 emissions from these activities.
Perform basic calculations on GHG emissions relating to different activities in buildings.
Consider how policies affect GHG emission in buildings.
Discuss the transport sector and its contribution to GHG emissions.
Calculate GHG emissions relating to different modes of transport and fuels.
Discover the efficiency and potential of alternate fuels and a variety of measures needed to decarbonize transport.

In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members design and build door alarms using a variety of materials, including aluminum foil, batteries, and buzzers.

In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members discover that metal is a good conductor of electricity as they play the steadiness tester game.

Mitigation of climate change is one of the most important challenges of our times. To prevent irreversible damage to human societies and the environment, it was agreed that world countries should limit the global average temperature rise. To avoid the dangerous impacts of climate change, it is needed to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 °C or even to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

This requires cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to near-zero levels in the coming decades. Especially for the energy system, a drastic transformation is needed.

We know that such a transformation is possible, but it will require virtually every organization, whether it is a steel company, a hospital or a municipality, to tackle climate change challenges. The question that often arises is – where to start?

This course is designed for the professionals that might be the leaders of this transformation in their organization - policymakers, sustainability consultants or professionals from other fields -who want to familiarize themselves with climate change mitigation strategies so theycan apply it to their projects.

In the first part of the course, you will obtain basic knowledge including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the various types of GHG (CO2 and non-CO2), their emissions and about the Paris Agreement. You will also learn about current energy systems, electricity generation and the energy demand of various sectors.

Next, we will focus on courses of action and methods that will assist in selecting the best options in any type of project or organization. We will present methodologies for measurement of emissions reduction and calculation of costs. Here we will introduce you to the concepts of “marginal abatement cost curves” which will help you analyze alternatives by comparing emission reduction potential with the costs involved. Finally, various options such as renewable energy, energy efficiency and electrification will be discussed as the emission reduction strategies.

We invite you to join this journey and to bring your own experiences and challenges to your organization.

Explore the role of national governments, municipalities, companies and the international community in climate change mitigation. Learn to set reduction targets yourself and translate them into action plans.

“Every action matters
Every bit of warming matters
Every year matters
Every choice matters.”

This was the brief summary of a 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific advisory board of the United Nations.

But who should take action?

In earlier courses, we already set out what is needed to limit the impact of climate change. In this course, we will explore the role of national governments, the international community, companies, and sub-national governments, like cities, municipalities, provinces, and regions.

We start from the idea that climate governance is polycentric. None of these parties can mitigate the dangers of climate change all by themselves. Each of these types of organization has its particular strength. If you work – or plan to work – in or with any such organization, then through this course you will learn how to be successful and effective in playing your part in mitigating climate change.

Important elements that will be discussed for the various players in the field are:

What roles can the different organizations play?
How can emission reduction targets be set so that they are both ambitious and feasible?
How can meaningful emission reduction plans be developed that actually result in emission reduction on the ground?
Examples will be presented by professionals who have been successful in their own organization. They are willing to share the failures and critical success factors in their strategies.

What You'll Learn
Understand how international climate agreements work.
Assess the sphere of influence of your own organization.
Learn how to develop national climate policies and evaluate the relevance of existing policies for your organization.
Be able to set ambitious and feasible GHG emission reduction targets for companies and discover how to translate these into a climate action plan.
Design approaches to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in supply chains.
Be able to set ambitious and feasible GHG emission reduction targets for cities and municipalities and learn how to translate these into climate action plans.
Decide in which areas the greatest acceleration of climate action is needed.

In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members make a bridge from a single piece of paper. Will it be strong enough to hold a hundred pennies?

Students are challenged to design a permanent guest village within the Saguaro National Park in Arizona. The design must provide a true desert experience to visitors while emphasizing sustainable design, protection of the natural environment, and energy and resource conservation. To successfully address and respond to this challenge, students must acquire an understanding of desert ecology, environmental limiting factors, species adaptations and resource utilization. Following theintroduction, students generate ideas and consider the knowledge required to complete the challenge. The lectures and activities that follow serve to develop this level of comprehension. To introduce the concepts of healthy ecosystems, biomimetics and the importance of sustainable environmental design, students watch three video clips of experts. These clips provide direction for student research and challenge design solutions.

This video from Nature offers a description of desirable traits in beef and dairy cattle.

Students acquire a basic understanding of the science and engineering of space travel as well as a brief history of space exploration. They learn about the scientists and engineers who made space travel possible and briefly examine some famous space missions. Finally, they learn the basics of rocket science (Newton's third law of motion), the main components of rockets and the U.S. space shuttle, and how engineers are involved in creating and launching spacecraft.

Students are introduced to detail drawings and the importance of clearly documenting and communicating their designs. They are introduced to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Y14.5 standard, which controls how engineers communicate and archive design information. They are introduced to standard paper sizes and drawing view conventions, which are major components of the Y14.5 standard.

In this activity, students will investigate how much chlorophyll is in olive oil using a Varnier Spectrometer. Students will measure and analyze the visible light absorbance spectra of three standard olive oils obtained from any supermarket: extra virgin, regular, and light.