This article provides links to lessons and units about birds, bird characteristics, and penguins. Ideas for literacy integration are included, and all lessons are aligned to national standards.

This article, written for students in grades 4-5, discusses the world's most southern active volcano, Mt. Erebus of Antarctica. Modified versions are available for students in younger grades.

Students learn about the heart and its role at the center of the human cardiovascular system. In the associated activity, students play out a scenario in which they are biomedical engineers asked to design artificial hearts. They learn about the path of blood flow through the heart and use that knowledge to evaluate designs of artificial hearts on the market.

Students learn about the form and function of the human heart through lecture, research and dissection. They brainstorm ideas that pertain to various heart conditions and organize these ideas into categories that help them research possible solutions. An expert in the field of cardiac valve research was interviewed for this lesson and shares his ideas with the class. Students conclude by researching various possible heart defects.

Students explore heat transfer and energy efficiency using the context of energy efficient houses. They gain a solid understanding of the three types of heat transfer: radiation, convection and conduction, which are explained in detail and related to the real world. They learn about the many ways solar energy is used as a renewable energy source to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses and operating costs. Students also explore ways in which a device can capitalize on the methods of heat transfer to produce a beneficial result. They are given the tools to calculate the heat transferred between a system and its surroundings.

Students gain a basic understanding of the engineering components behind telecommunications, in particular, the way telephone communication works to link one phone to another for conventional landline and cellular telephones. During this entire-class activity, students simulate how phone calls are connected by acting out a variety of searches for both local and long-distance calls. Students end up with a good understanding of how phone calls are transmitted from callers to recipients.

Students learn the basic relationship of Snell's Law, practice applying it to a situation, then are given another situation where it "doesn't work."??? This situation turns out to be one in which total internal reflection occurs. Students are then shown what happens with classroom apparatus.

Steganography is the science and art of hiding messages in plain sight so only the sender and intended recipient know the existence of a message. Steganography can be characterized as security through obscurity. Through this lesson, students experience a portion of the engineering design process as they research steganography and steganographic methods; identify problems, criteria and constraints; brainstorm possible solutions; and generate ideas. These are the critical first steps in the engineering design process, often overlooked by students who want to get to the "doing" phases—designing, building and testing. In computer science, a thorough design phase makes program implementation much easier and more effective. Students obtain practice with a portion of the design process that may be less exciting, but is just as important as the other steps in the process.

A main concern of shoe engineers is creating shoes that provide the right amount of arch support to prevent (or fix) common gait misalignments that lead to injury. During this activity, students look at their own footprints and determine whether they have either of the two most prominent gait misalignments: overpronation (collapsing arches) or supination (high arches). Knowing the shape of a person's foot, and their natural arch movement is necessary to design shoes to fix these gain alignments.

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. As of March 1998, America's built environment has been recorded through surveys containing more than 363,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

This course provides a basic overview of the history of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Students will learn about specific contributions of women across a variety of disciplines and will gain a broad perspective on how these contributions played a larger role in the advancement of human knowledge and technological achievement. The class will also grapple with how both historic and modern biases within the STEM disciplines, as well as in representations of women and girls in media and popular culture, can affect outcomes in these areas.

In this activity, the students will use wax paper shaped as leaves and kite string to build a shelter to protect them from the rain. The students will then test the shelters for durability and water resistance.

Students review the what they have learned throughout the five lessons in this unit. This includes a review of many types of engineers, reminding students of the various everyday products, structures and processes they design and create in our world.

Design and engineer a mechanical device that is powered by hydraulic (syringe and water) that includes levers and moving parts that will propel a ping pong ball to complete the 2 levels of the “Hoop Shoot Challenge”.

Design and engineer a mechanical device that is powered by hydraulic (syringe and water) that includes levers and moving parts that will propel a ping pong ball to complete the 2 levels of the “Hoop Shoot Challenge”.

Student teams follow the steps of the engineering design process to meet the challenge of getting their entire class from one location on the playground to the sidewalk without touching the ground between. The class develops a well thought-out plan while following the steps of the engineering design process. Then, they test their solution by going outside and trying it out. Through the post-activity assessment, they compare their problem-solving experience to real life engineering challenges, such as creating new forms of transportation or new product invention.

In this video segment from PEEP and the Big Wide World, children experiment with cardboard and build a house for their stuffed animals.

This article reprints and links to informational text about the art and science of igloos. Versions are available for students in grades K-1, 2-3 and 4-5. Related science and literacy activities are included.

Students are introduced to a challenge question. Towards answering the question, they generate ideas for what they need to know about medicines and how they move through our bodies, watch a few short videos to gain multiple perspectives, and then learn lecture material to obtain a basic understanding of how antibiotics kill bacteria in the human body. They learn why different forms of medicine (pill, liquid or shot) get into the blood stream at different speeds.

Students teams determine the size of the caverns necessary to house the population of the state of Alabraska from the impending asteroid impact. They measure their classroom to determine area and volume, determine how many people the space could sleep, and scale this number up to accommodate all Alabraskans. They work through problems on a worksheet and perform math conversions between feet/meters and miles/kilometers.