In this middle school and high school unit, students compare and constrast Arctic expeditions of the past (1893-1896 Fram expedition) and the present (2019-2020 MOSAiC expedition) to prepare for the Arctic of the future.

In this activity, the students will develop a briefing for a T.V. evening news program that summarizes their experiences surviving in the Amazon rainforest. The students will have the opportunity to role play as interviewer and interviewee in presentations to the class.

This online exhibit is a visual illusion in which a fuzzy blue dot disappears into a green background. The illusion is created by the tiny jittering movements that your eyes are continually making. Take your investigation further by making your own hands-on fading dot illusion - instructions are at the Exploratorium Snack website (see related link).

Children in kindergarten through fifth grade and their families are invited to learn more about the field of engineering in this hour-long special program. Family Night: Engineering introduces children to cool careers within the field of engineering that range from building roller coasters to designing artificial heart pumps for children who need them. Children will also get a chance to participate in hands-on engineering activities during the program!

The best part? Everything they need to participate can be found right in your home.

Play with a bar magnet and coils to learn about Faraday's law. Move a bar magnet near one or two coils to make a light bulb glow. View the magnetic field lines. A meter shows the direction and magnitude of the current. View the magnetic field lines or use a meter to show the direction and magnitude of the current. You can also play with electromagnets, generators and transformers!

Almost everyone has wished at one time or another to be able to fly like a bird. Just the thought of soaring above your city or town without any mechanical device gives us a reason to envy these feathered animals. Also in: French | Spanish

All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of medicine delivery (pill, liquid, injection/shot) offers the fastest relief. This challenge question serves as a real-world context for learning all about flow rates. Students study how long various prescription methods take to introduce chemicals into our blood streams, as well as use flow rate to determine how increasing a person's heart rate can theoretically make medicines work more quickly. Students are introduced to engineering devices that simulate what occurs during the distribution of antibiotic cells in the body.

Working individually or in groups, students explore the concept of stress (compression) through physical experience and math. They discover why it hurts more to poke themselves with mechanical pencil lead than with an eraser. Then they prove why this is so by using the basic equation for stress and applying the concepts to real engineering problems.

Using the LEGO® NXT robotics kit, students construct and program robots to illustrate and explore the Fibonacci sequence. Within teams, students are assigned roles: group leader, chassis builder, arm builder, chief programmer, and Fibonacci verifier. By designing a robot that moves based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, they can better visualize how quickly the numbers in the sequence grow. To program the robot to move according to these numbers, students break down the sequence into simple algebraic equations so that the computer can understand the Fibonacci sequence.

This is a series of five activities about geology on the moon. Learners will explore lunar stratigraphy (caused by lava flows), impact craters, the moon's history, spacecraft design in which students build models of the LRO out of edible or non-edible materials, and the future of lunar exploration. This guide includes the activities from the original Field Trip to the Moon guide plus activities relating to these two moon missions - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.

We plan to facilitate several engineering lessons that requires students to design, build ROV controllers, calculate weight, underwater thrust and buoyancy.

These two videos teach students how to build a structurally sound popsicle stick bridge then uses this lesson to teach the importance of budgeting.

In this activity, the students will investigate a variety of plants and animals common to the Amazon through research. They will determine the plant or animal characteristics that make them edible or useful for the trip and learn to categorize them by comparing similarities and/or differences.

This course introduces finite element methods for the analysis of solid, structural, fluid, field, and heat transfer problems. Steady-state, transient, and dynamic conditions are considered. Finite element methods and solution procedures for linear and nonlinear analyses are presented using largely physical arguments. The homework and a term project (for graduate students) involve use of the general purpose finite element analysis program ADINA. Applications include finite element analyses, modeling of problems, and interpretation of numerical results.

Finite element analysis is now widely used for solving complex static and dynamic problems encountered in engineering and the sciences. In these two video courses, Professor K. J. Bathe, a researcher of world renown in the field of finite element analysis, teaches the basic principles used for effective finite element analysis, describes the general assumptions, and discusses the implementation of finite element procedures for linear and nonlinear analyses.
These videos were produced in 1982 and 1986 by the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

Students demonstrate their knowledge of Newton’s 1st Law of Motion as they engineer a new method for putting
out fires. As they iterate through this design challenge, they gain firsthand experience in the design process.. (Note: No real fire is used in this challenge.)

This video segment adapted from NOVA explains how the sprinkler revolutionized fire safety and also features developments in fire-safety design for high-rise buildings.

The three friends help a neighbor whose hat blows away and find out about weathervanes and wind direction. They make windsocks and spinning garden decorations.

Students discover fluid dynamics related to buoyancy through experimentation and optional photography. Using one set of fluids, they make light fluids rise through denser fluids. Using another set, they make dense fluids sink through a lighter fluid. In both cases, they see and record beautiful fluid motion. Activities are also suitable as class demonstrations. The natural beauty of fluid flow opens the door to seeing the beauty of physics in general.