In this video produced for Teachers' Domain, meet Sandra Bustamante, a university research assistant who started her career with a biotechnology certificate and is now using nanotechnology—rather than needles—to deliver vaccines.

Four Antarctica researchers describe how they keep warm while working in extreme cold, taking lessons from adaptations of wildlife.

This is an activity about image resolution. Learners will recreate a solar image taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) using various sizes of building bricks, and discuss how their recreations relate to image resolution. Learners will also compare SDO images to solar images from older spacecraft to see how improved technology helps scientists learn more about the Sun.

This video segment from Kentucky Life describes how scientists control pollination of one of the few remaining American chestnut trees to develop blight resistant trees.

Watch a reaction proceed over time. How does total energy affect a reaction rate? Vary temperature, barrier height, and potential energies. Record concentrations and time in order to extract rate coefficients. Do temperature dependent studies to extract Arrhenius parameters. This simulation is best used with teacher guidance because it presents an analogy of chemical reactions.

This was a collaborative effort between Kimberly Whittaker, Eileen Duggan and Rebeca Pietrzak. Student design a student classroom workstation to meet 21st century learning needs.

Students build on their understanding and feel for flow rates, as gained from the associated Faucet Flow Rate activity, to estimate the flow rate of a local river. The objective is to be able to relate laboratory experiment results to the environment. They use the U.S. Geological Survey website (http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt) to determine the actual flow rate data for their river, and compare their estimates to the actual flow rate. For this activity to be successful, choose a nearby river and take a field trip or show a video so students gain a visual feel for the flow of the nearby river.

Students learn various topics associated with the circle through studying a clock. Topics include reading analog time, understanding the concept of rotation (clockwise vs. counter-clockwise), and identifying right angles and straight angles within circles. Many young students have difficulty telling time in analog format, especially with fewer analog clocks in use (compared to digital clocks). This includes the ability to convert time written in words to a number format, for example, making the connection between "quarter of an hour" to 15 minutes. Students also find it difficult to convert "quarter of an hour" to the number of degrees in a circle. This activity incorporates a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robot to help students distinguish and visualize the differences in clockwise vs. counter-clockwise rotation and right vs. straight angles, while learning how to tell time on an analog clock. To promote team learning and increase engagement, students work in teams to program and control the robot.

In this video segment adapted from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team from the Mechanical Engineering Department studies snail movement for inspiration that may lead to new forms of robotic locomotion.

Featuring slow-motion footage of insects in flight, this video adapted from NOVA explores the engineering challenge of designing a robotic aerial vehicle that flies like a bug.

Introduces the fundamental algorithmic approaches for creating robot systems that can autonomously manipulate physical objects in unstructured environments such as homes and restaurants. Topics include perception (including approaches based on deep learning and approaches based on 3D geometry), planning (robot kinematics and trajectory generation, collision-free motion planning, task-and-motion planning, and planning under uncertainty), as well as dynamics and control (both model-based and learning-based).
Homework assignments will guide students through building a software stack that will enable a robotic arm to autonomously manipulation objects in cluttered scenes (like a kitchen). A final project will allow students to dig deeper into a specific aspect of their choosing. The class has hardware available for ambitious final projects, but will also make heavy use of simulation using cloud resources.

Students learn and practice how to find the perimeter of a polygonal shape. Using a ruler, they measure model rooms made of construction paper walls. They learn about other tools, such as a robot, that can help them take measurements. Using a robot built from a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT kit that has been programmed to move along a wall and output the length of that wall, students record measurements and compare the perimeter value found with the robot to the perimeter found using a ruler. In both cases, students sketch maps to the scale of the model room and label the measured lengths. A concluding discussion explores the ways in which using a robot may be advantageous or disadvantageous, and real-world applications.

Suggestions and resources for hands-on activities to teach elementary students about rocks and minerals.

Students learn about probability through a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NTX-based activity that simulates a game of "rock-paper-scissors." The LEGO robot mimics the outcome of random game scenarios in order to help students gain a better understanding of events that follow real-life random phenomenon, such as bridge failures, weather forecasts and automobile accidents. Students learn to connect keywords such as certainty, probable, unlikely and impossibility to real-world engineering applications.

Students are presented with a challenge question that they must answer with scientific and mathematical reasoning. The challenge question is: "You have a large rock on a boat that is floating in a pond. You throw the rock overboard and it sinks to the bottom of the pond. Does the water level in the pond rise, drop or remain the same?" Students observe Archimedes' principle in action in this model recreation of the challenge question when a toy boat is placed in a container of water and a rock is placed on the floating boat. Students use terminology learned in the classroom as well as critical thinking skills to derive equations needed to answer this question.

In this activity, students revisit the Pop Rockets activity from Lesson 3. This time, however, the design of their pop-rockets will be limited by budgets and supplies. They will get a feel for the limitations of a real engineering project as well as an opportunity to redesign and retest their rockets.

This issue of the free online magazine, Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, explores the basic characteristics of rocks and minerals, the types of rocks, the rock cycle, and the specimens found in the polar regions. Find lessons that allow students to observe rock and mineral specimens, perform classification exercises, and read to develop their content knowledge.

This article assembles free resources from the Rocks and Minerals 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.

Students learn about rotary encoders and discover how they operate through hands-on experimentation. Rotary encoders are applied in tools to determine angle measurements and for translations of angular motion. One common rotary encoder application is in a computer's ball-type mouse—the ball itself is a type of rotary encoder. In this activity, students experiment with two rotary encoders, including one from a computer mouse and one created using a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT kit. They collect data to define and graph the relationship between the motion of the rotary encoder and its output.

This activity is about planetary rovers. Learners will simulate the challenges in communications that engineers face when driving a rover on Mars. They will particpate as part of a rover team to design and execute a series of commands that will guide a rover made of people through an obstacle course simulating the Martian surface. Students will learn the limitations of operating a planetary rover and problem solving solutions by using this simulation. The lesson models the engineering design process using the 5E instructional model and includes teacher notes, vocabulary, student journal and reading.