Students are given a variety of materials and asked to identify each material as a solid, liquid or gas. They use their five senses ‰ŰÓ sight, sound, smell, texture and taste ‰ŰÓ to identify the other characteristics of each item.

Students will explore with solids and liquids to discover what density is. Students will be involved in small group experiments and a full group experiment. Observing, predicting, exploring and discovering are all included in this lesson.

This guided inquiry lesson allows students to make explore with materials and draw conclusions if they are a solid or liquid.

This activity is a classroom activity where the students move through learning stations to explore the properties of solids and liquids.

This pathway explores the concept of sound. Sound is described in terms of its wave properties, and properties of sound are explained, such as interference, and the Doppler Effect. There is additional information on how hearing works.

This interactive simulation, adapted from the University of Colorado's Physics Education Technology project, illustrates sound waves. Adjust the frequency and amplitude to see and hear how the waves change.

Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments. Through three lessons, students come to better understand sound waves, including how they change with distance, travel through different mediums, and are enhanced or mitigated in designed sound environments. They are introduced to audio engineers who use their expert scientific knowledge to manipulate sound for music and film production. They see how the invention of the telephone pioneered communications engineering, leading to today's long-range communication industry and its worldwide impact. Students analyze materials for sound properties suitable for acoustic design, learning about the varied environments created by acoustical engineers. Hands-on activities include modeling the placement of microphones to create a specific musical image, modeling and analyzing a string telephone, and applyling what they've learned about sound waves and materials to model a controlled sound room.

Students are introduced to the sound environment as an important aspect of a room or building. Several examples of acoustical engineering design for varied environments are presented. Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments.

In this lesson, students are introduced to communications engineers as people who enable long-range communication. In the lesson demonstration, students discuss the tendency of sound to diminish with distance and model this phenomenon using a slinky. Finally, Alexander Graham Bell is introduced as the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in communications engineering.

Students learn the decibel reading of various noises and why high-level readings damage hearing. Sound types and decibel readings are written on sheets of paper, and students arrange the sounds from the lowest to highest decibel levels. If available, a decibel meter can be used to measure sounds by students.

This inquiry lab activity involves students working to understand that sound is made from vibrations.

Students learn about sound and sound energy as they gather evidence that sound travels in waves. Teams work through five activity stations that provide different perspectives on how sound can be seen and felt. At one station, students observe oobleck (a shear-thickening fluid made of cornstarch and water) “dance” on a speaker as it interacts with sound waves (see Figure 1). At another station, the water or grain inside a petri dish placed on a speaker moves and make patterns, giving students a visual understanding of the wave properties of sound. At another station, students use objects of various materials and shapes (such as Styrofoam, paper, cardboard, foil) to amplify or distort the sound output of a homemade speaker (made from another TeachEngineering activity). At another station, students complete practice problems, drawing waves of varying amplitude and frequency. And at another station, they experiment with string (and guitar wire and stringed instruments, if available) to investigate how string tightness influences the plucked sound generated, and relate this sound to high/low frequency. A worksheet guides them through the five stations. Some or all of the stations may be included, depending on class size, resources and available instructors/aides, and this activity is ideal for an engineering family event.

This interactive quiz from the NOVA Web site features an array of interesting facts about the nature of sound underwater.

Students are provided with an understanding of sound and light waves through a "sunken treasure" theme a continuous storyline throughout the lessons. In the first five lessons, students learn about sound, and in the rest of the lessons, they explore light concepts. To begin, students are introduced to the concepts of longitudinal and transverse waves. Then they learn about wavelength and amplitude in transverse waves. In the third lesson, students learn about sound through the introduction of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds. Next, they learn all about echolocation what it is and how engineers use it to "see" things in the dark or deep underwater. The last of the five sound lessons introduces acoustics; students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.

This video segment, adapted from ZOOM, explores how sound waves travel differently through solids than through air, in this case, a metal clothes hanger.

Music can loosely be defined as organized sound. The lesson objectives, understanding sound is a form of energy, understanding pitch, understanding sound traveling through a medium, and being able to separate music from sound, can provide a good knowledge base as to how sound, math, and music are related. Sound exists everywhere in the world; typically objects cause waves of pressure in the air which are perceived by people as sound. Among the sounds that exist in everyday life, a few of them produce a definite pitch. For example, blowing air over half full glass bottles, tapping a glass with a spoon, and tapping long steel rods against a hard surface all produce a definite pitch because a certain component of the object vibrates in a periodic fashion. The pitch produced by an object can be changed by the length or the volume of the portion that vibrates. For example, by gradually filling a bottle while blowing across the top, higher pitches can be generated. By organizing a few of these sounds with a clearer pitch, the sounds become closer to music. The very first musical instruments involved using various objects (e.g. bells) that have different pitches, which are played in sequence. The organization of the pitches is what transforms sounds into music. Since the first instruments, the ability to control pitch has greatly improved as illustrated by more modern instruments such as guitars, violins, pianos, and more. Music is comprised of organized sound, which is made of specific frequencies. This lesson will help define and elaborate on the connections between sound and music.

The students are to calculate the specific heat of three metal objects. Then they are to determine the type of metal.

Students use the spectrographs from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about light sources. Using their data, they make comparisons between different light sources and make conjectures about the composition of a mystery light source.

Students learn how using spectrographs helps people understand the composition of light sources. Using simple materials including holographic diffraction gratings, students create and customize their own spectrographs just like engineers. They gather data about different light sources, make comparisons between sources and theorize about their compositions. Before building spectrographs, students learn and apply several methods to identify and interpret patterns, specifically different ways of displaying visual spectra. They also use spectral data from the Cassini mission to Saturn and its moon, Titan, to determine the chemical composition of the planet's rings and its moon's atmosphere.

This video segment adapted from Shedding Light on Science uses historical illustrations and everyday examples to show that light has a speed and does not travel instantaneously.