Have you ever wondered how objects from our daily lives are designed? How can we generate a computer 3D model of a mug, a bottle of Diet Coke, or a Saturn V rocket? What about designing the blades of a jet engine? A test dummy? How about making an animation of a LEGO house building itself? Or making a realistic render of a bowl of fruit? In this workshop, you will learn skills to design all these and much more!
How to CAD Almost Anything introduces students to CAD (Computer Aided Design) through various fun examples focused on reverse engineering. In contrast to traditional mechanical design courses, this workshop emphasizes the design process itself, understanding how we can plan and best leverage our available tools to arrive at our desired result. Thus, the sessions are less about following the instructions on an engineering drawing, and more about independent thinking and strategizing, reverse engineering an object into a 3D model.
Come and learn how to CAD almost anything!
This supplemental resource offers links to the class’s Solidworks, Fusion 360, and Onshape website materials and companion playlists of the Solidworks, Fusion 360, and Onshape session recordings on YouTube.

In Blazing a Genetic Trail, by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, follow this three-step approach to treating genetic diseases.

Students measure and analyze forces that act on vehicles pulling heavy objects while moving at a constant speed on a frictional surface. They study how the cars interact with their environments through forces, and discover which parameters in the design of the cars and environments could be altered to improve vehicles' pulling power. This LEGO® MINDSTORMS® based activity is geared towards, but not limited to, physics students.

In this lesson, students will learn how great navigators of the past stayed on course that is, the historical methods of navigation. The concepts of dead reckoning and celestial navigation are discussed.

We want to develop citizens who are knowledgeable problem-solvers as they tackle the challenges of improving the quality of life for themselves and the world around them. One approach that has been heavily utilized in universities and businesses in recent times is known as Design Thinking. It is a model adopted by famous companies such as Google, Apple and Airbnb and they have wielded it to notable effect. The design thinking model is an incredibly powerful and useful process for students to use whenever they are faced with designing solutions to help others. Like any process or skill, it will take practice to become good at it.

While the heart of this unit is the Design Thinking process, I have also connected it to life science concepts related to the human body as outlined in both NGSS and Connecticut State Standards. The unit should take nine or ten 45 minute lessons to complete, depending on the complexity of the projects to be prototyped and tested.

This video segment from NOVA: "Cracking the Code of Life" looks at the meaning and significance of the effort to decode the human genome.

This resource is a 4 x 6" lenticular card on NASA's HS3 (Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel) aircraft mission, which will overfly tropical storms and hurricanes using NASA's Global Hawk Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the Northern Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. These flights will improve our understanding of the processes that lead to the development of intense hurricanes. The mission will take place for one-month periods during the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Atlantic Basin hurricane seasons.

HydroViz is an educational "virtual" hydrologic observatory developed for a "real" watershed and is based on integration of field data, remote sensing observations and computer simulations of hydrologic variables and processes. The main purpose of HydroViz is to support hydrology education in engineering and earth science courses.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

The course addresses a fundamental issue in system design and management, the need for engineering leaders to recognize uncertainty in the performance of their plans or designs. It presents discounted cash flow (DCF) Excel models, simulation, and decision analysis as primary ways to analyze possible outcomes of design and management strategies. It also addresses how we should analyze possible performance outcomes and cope with risks in demand, requirements, cost, technology, etc.

Maker Faire participants collaborate in ISKME's Design Lab, using digital stories and salvaged materials to design an innovative school of the future. The Design Lab features Makers Mauro ffortisimo Di Nucci's deconstructed piano and INKA Biospheric Systems' Vertical Garden; as well as Student and Teacher project examples that integrate art, science, sustainability, and green design inspire the creation of shareable open-source learning resources. This wiki page showcases photos and video from the Design Lab, open educational resources for teachers, and a step by step guide through the design process.

Activities, resources, photos and videos from ISKME's two day professional development teacher training that explores Open Educational Resources (OER) and Maker-Teacher collaborations to facilitate innovation in the classroom. The Makers’ projects are points of inspiration for Teachers while they engage in design-thinking activities to create, remix, and share OER Projects with online collaborative tools.

This article describes two hands-on lessons to teach elementary and middle school students about ice, glaciers, and climate change in the polar regions.

This nonfiction article, written for students in grades 4-5, explores the ways in which glaciers shape the Earth's land. Modified versions are available for students in younger grades.

This issue of the free online magazine, Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, contains content knowledge and instructional resources about icebergs and glaciers and the scientific principles of density and buoyancy.

This article assembles free resources from the Icebergs and Glaciers issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

In this activity, learners investigate the speed of chemical reactions with light sticks. Learners discover that reactions can be sped up or slowed down due to temperature changes.

The course is designed to provide a better understanding of the built environment, globalization, the current financial crisis and the impact of these factors on the rapidly changing and evolving international architecture, engineering, construction fields.
We will, hopefully, obtain a better understanding of how these forces of globalization and the current financial crisis are having an impact on the built environment and how they will affect firms and your future career opportunities. We will also identify, review and discuss best practices and lessons that can be learned from recent events.
We will explore the “international built environment” in detail, examining how it functions and asking what are the managerial, entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, challenges and risks in it, especially growing crossover and multi-disciplinary opportunities; and we will seek to understand what makes this “built environment” so different from other sectors.

This video segment adapted from A Science Odyssey looks at the invention of the automobile and the development of mass production.

This video segment adapted from A Science Odyssey looks at the invention of nylon.