In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members make their own hovercraft and demonstrate how the air leaking out of a balloon can make a plastic plate hover above a table.

Use aluminum foil, salt water, and activated charcoal to construct a simple battery strong enough to power a small motor or light.

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past.

This course introduces the ethnographic study of politics, i.e., what anthropologists understand to be “political” in various social and economic systems, from small-scale societies to liberal democratic states. It examines politics across three contemporary contexts: electoral politics, public spheres, bureaucracies and humanitarian governance. Students consider and analyze how questions of authority, coercion, and violence have been theorized to relate to the political, and how some aspects of social life are regimented in explicitly non-political ways.

Look inside a resistor to see how it works. Increase the battery voltage to make more electrons flow though the resistor. Increase the resistance to block the flow of electrons. Watch the current and resistor temperature change.

Students read news reports and first-person accounts to imagine what it would be like to be in a blackout in a large city. They follow news reports as if the event were unfolding in real-time and keep weblogs or journals of their experience as they imagine it, taking on different roles of people who live in the city or commute there to work. They use their journal accounts to create a play or screenplay that depicts what the August 2003 blackout was like for the people in the U.S. and Canada who experienced it. Although this activity is geared towards fifth-grade and older students, it could be easily adapted for younger students.

Construct and measure the energy efficiency and solar heat gain of a cardboard model house. Use a light bulb heater to imitate a real furnace and a temperature sensor to monitor and regulate the internal temperature of the house. Use a bright bulb in a gooseneck lamp to model sunlight at different times of the year, and test the effectiveness of windows for passive solar heating.

Students are introduced to several key concepts of electronic circuits. They learn about some of the physics behind circuits, the key components in a circuit and their pervasiveness in our homes and everyday lives. Students learn about Ohm's Law and how it is used to analyze circuits.

Hydropower generation is introduced to students as a common purpose and benefit of constructing dams. Through an introduction to kinetic and potential energy, students come to understand how a dam creates electricity. They also learn the difference between renewable and non-renewable energy.

This is a college-level history of California that covers (in thirteen chapters) the state's history prior to Spanish colonization and up through the present day. Three major themes provide a unifying thread for the narrative: demographic and cultural diversity, California's relationship to the nation and world, and competing visions of the "California Dream," including contestations over the allocation of cultural, economic, and political power. The text is richly illustrated with maps, charts, photographs, and art.

This course is offered to graduates and is a project-oriented course to teach new methodologies for designing multi-million-gate CMOS VLSI chips using high-level synthesis tools in conjunction with standard commercial EDA tools. The emphasis is on modular and robust designs, reusable modules, correctness by construction, architectural exploration, and meeting the area, timing, and power constraints within standard cell and FPGA frameworks.

Students learn how the total solar irradiance hitting a photovoltaic (PV) panel can be increased through the use of a concentrating device, such as a reflector or lens. This is the final lesson in the Photovoltaic Efficiency unit and is intended to accompany a fun design project (see the associated Concentrating on the Sun with PVs activity) to wrap up the unit. However, it can be completed independently of the other unit lessons and activities.

Students design, build and test reflectors to measure the effect of solar reflectance on the efficiency of solar PV panels. They use a small PV panel, a multimeter, cardboard and foil to build and test their reflectors in preparation for a class competition. Then they graph and discuss their results with the class. Complete this activity as part of the Photovoltaic Efficiency unit and in conjunction with the Concentrated Solar Power lesson.

In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, two solar cookers are tested against a control to see which can cook a "s'more" faster.

Students gain an understanding of the factors that affect wind turbine operation. Following the steps of the engineering design process, engineering teams use simple materials (cardboard and wooden dowels) to build and test their own turbine blade prototypes with the objective of maximizing electrical power output for a hypothetical situation—helping scientists power their electrical devices while doing research on a remote island. Teams explore how blade size, shape, weight and rotation interact to achieve maximal performance, and relate the power generated to energy consumed on a scale that is relevant to them in daily life. A PowerPoint® presentation, worksheet and post-activity test are provided.

A favorite movie, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” provides the backdrop scenario for students to discover how harnessing the sun’s energy provides unlimited power for many purposes, including the operation of thousands of satellites in orbit today and communication over long distances. In the movie, E.T., an alien life form, is stranded on Earth and befriends Elliott, the little boy who rescues him. As E.T. becomes gravely ill, Elliott realizes that E.T. needs to return home in order to survive. To arrange for transport, E.T. must “phone home.” Teams engage in an interactive quest to answer the question: E.T. phone home—fact or fiction? They must discover four clues in order to unlock four padlocks on a box that contains the answer. This requires them to watch a one-minute online video, complete a crossword puzzle, scan three QR codes for articles to read, and put together a cut-apart puzzle with an invisible ink clue. They watch short online movie excerpt videos to kick off and wrap up the activity.

Electricity powers almost everything we use each day. It’s hard to believe that people used to live without it! In this seminar, you will learn about that circuits that allow electricity to flow and power the items in our homes. By the end of this seminar you will be able to accurately explain the pathway of a circuit.Standards3.2.4.B4Apply knowledge of basic electrical circuits to the design and construction of simple direct current circuits.

In this video David derives the formula to find the power used by a resistor. Created by David SantoPietro.

This course explores electromagnetic phenomena in modern applications, including wireless communications, circuits, computer interconnects and peripherals, optical fiber links and components, microwave communications and radar, antennas, sensors, micro-electromechanical systems, motors, and power generation and transmission. Fundamentals covered include: quasistatic and dynamic solutions to Maxwell’s equations; waves, radiation, and diffraction; coupling to media and structures; guided and unguided waves; resonance; and forces, power, and energy.
Acknowledgments
The instructors would like to thank Robert Haussman for transcribing into LaTeX the problem set and Quiz 2 solutions.

Demos and activities in this lesson are intended to illustrate the basic concepts of energy science -- work, force, energy, power etc. and the relationships among them. The "lecture" portion of the lesson includes many demonstrations to keep students engaged, yet has high expectations for the students to perform energy related calculations and convert units as required. A homework assignment and quiz are used to reinforce and assess these basic engineering science concepts.