In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students examine energy forms in moving objects and discover how changes from one form to another move cars through a roller coaster ride.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
On NOVA, a team of carpenters, timber framers, engineers, and historians recreate a medieval throwing machine called a trebuchet. This adapted video segment explores how understanding energy transfer informs their design.
Material Type: Lecture
Under the "The Science Behind Harry Potter" theme, a succession of diverse complex scientific topics are presented to students through direct immersive interaction. Student interest is piqued by the incorporation of popular culture into the classroom via a series of interactive, hands-on Harry Potter/movie-themed lessons and activities. They learn about the basics of acid/base chemistry (invisible ink), genetics and trait prediction (parseltongue trait in families), and force and projectile motion (motion of the thrown remembrall). In each lesson and activity, students are also made aware of the engineering connections to these fields of scientific study.
Material Type: Unit of Study
Explore the concept of evaporative cooling through a hands-on experiment. Use a wet cloth and fan to model an air-conditioner and use temperature and relative humidity sensors to collect data. Then digitally plot the data using graphs in the activity. In an optional extension, make your own modifications to improve the cooler's efficiency.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Diagram/Illustration, Lecture Notes
In this NASA video, scientists describe how the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment will sample and track the Sun's ultraviolet irradiance, providing a detailed time sequence of extreme ultraviolet output -- data that can provide advance warning for potentially disruptive energy bursts.
Material Type: Lesson
Students explore the chemical identities of polymeric materials frequently used in their everyday lives. They learn how chemical composition affects the physical properties of the materials that they encounter and use frequently, as well as how cross-linking affects the properties of polymeric materials.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Once the pride of the German Navy, this 700 foot long heavy cruiser was used by the U.S. as a test target for not one but two atom bombs at Bikini atoll. Today, at the bottom of the ocean, the radiation levels of the Prinz Eugen are low enough for safe exploration. In this video, Jonathan joins historian Mark Miller on a trip to explore this mysterious shipwreck. What they find about the condition of this wreck is surprising. Please see the accompanying lesson plan for educational objectives, discussion points and classroom activities.
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lesson Plan
Students study an ancient bronze statue, analyze its pose, and discover how conservators remove and prevent corrosion. They learn that the bronze used to make this sculpture is an alloy of copper and tin with small amounts of antimony, lead, iron, silver, nickel, and cobalt. They use the periodic table to research the chemical formulas of compounds used to make bronze. After learning about oxidation-reduction reactions that occurred in the statue, students speculate about the conservation techniques needed to conserve the bronze sculpture.
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lesson Plan
In this activity, students critically analyze prior conceptions and textbook visuals of the relative sizes and orbiting distance of the Earth-moon system (and other bodies in our solar system), search out sources for this data, and construct scale models by using balls of various sizes. There are tips for helping learners understand the large scales (i.e., millions rather than thousands) that characterize our solar system, and examples are provided of scaling using different sizes of athletic balls.
Material Type: Interactive, Lesson Plan
In this activity, students investigate how pressure affects the temperature of air and how this relates to the formation of clouds in the troposphere. They will form a cloud in a bottle, find the dew point and relative humidity of air at different places in the school and use a chart to estimate how high that air would have to rise to form a cloud.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
In this activity, students use a National Weather Service flood forecast, USGS gauging data, and other reports to estimate the maximum storm discharge from the New River and Wolf Creek, two streams in the Southeast U.S. which experienced flooding in November 2003. Topographic and urban maps are used to predict where flooding would occur and to evaluate strategies for reducing flood risk for the residents of the region.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn how the forces of gravity and air resistance affect the motion of falling objects.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
UCSD Division of Physical Sciences presents a discussion on global warming and the prospects of a hydrogen economy. The featured speakers are: Joseph J. Romm, executive director of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions and author of The Hype About Hydrogen - Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate; and Franklin M. (Lynn) Orr, Jr. professor of petroleum engineering and project director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. (59 minutes)
Material Type: Lecture
This video from NASA describes the GLAST satellite, which is equipped with a gamma-ray telescope, and shares some background about the kinds of extreme universal phenomena indicated by the presence of gamma rays.
Material Type: Lesson
In this activity, students study gas laws at a molecular level. They vary the volume of a container at constant temperature to see how pressure changes (Boyle's Law), change the temperature of a container at constant pressure to see how the volume changes with temperature (Charles’s Law), and experiment with heating a gas in a closed container to discover how pressure changes with temperature (Gay Lussac's Law). They also discover the relationship between the number of gas molecules and gas volume (Avogadro's Law). Finally, students use their knowledge of gas laws to model a heated soda can collapsing as it is plunged into ice water.
Material Type: Data Set, Diagram/Illustration, Interactive, Lecture Notes
An integrated course stressing the principles of biology. Life processes are examined primarily at the molecular and cellular levels. Intended for students majoring in biology or for non-majors who wish to take advanced biology courses.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Full Course, Lecture Notes, Syllabus
Students are challenged to think as biomedical engineers and brainstorm ways to administer medication to a patient who is unable to swallow. They learn about the advantages and disadvantages of current drug delivery methods—oral, injection, topical, inhalation and suppository—and pharmaceutical design considerations, including toxicity, efficacy, size, solubility/bioavailability and drug release duration. They apply their prior knowledge about human anatomy, the circulatory system, polymers, crystals and stoichiometry to real-world biomedical applications. A Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation and worksheets are provided. This lesson prepares students for the associated activity in which they create and test large-size drug encapsulation prototypes to provide the desired delayed release and duration timing.
Material Type: Lesson
This educational video features Sperm whales and has an accompanying lesson plan to teach about Sound in the Sea. The Sperm whale holds many records. It is the deepest-diving whale on Earth, the largest toothed whale on Earth and has the largest brain on the planet too. On top of that, it has a reputation for being a vicious beast, thanks in part to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. But the real Sperm whale is a lot different than people think. It has a highly-evolved social life, operates at depths where nobody can see them most of the time, and uses sonar which is so sophisticated that it makes the Navy's electronics look like toys. Sperm whales are very hard to find and even harder to film. In the Caribbean, Jonathan repeatedly attempts to get close to the elusive whales, until finally he succeeds and has an incredible experience eye to eye with a giant who investigates him with powerful sonar clicks. Please see the accompanying lesson plan for educational objectives, discussion points and classroom activities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Diagram/Illustration, Lecture Notes, Lesson Plan
In this activity, learners explore liquid crystals, light and temperature. Using a postcard made of temperature-sensitive liquid crystal material, learners monitor temperature changes. By observing these changes, learners show that dark materials absorb and reemit the energy contained in light more readily than light-colored materials. Learners can also distinguish energy absorbed and reemited by radiation, convection, and conduction by comparing the behavior of black, white, and silver objects. This resource guide includes detailed explanation of the phenomenon and background information about liquid crystals.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This video segment adapted from NOVA/FRONTLINE examines the greenhouse effect, its role in keeping Earth habitable, and the industrial changes that have led to an increase in the planet's average temperature.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
