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.

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.

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

This lesson is designed to help students understand that vibrations are responsible for the sounds we hear. Additionally, they learn that sound vibrations can travel through different mediums. Students experience vibrations using several of their senses: They feel the vibrations in their throat as they hum music, and on their lips as they play their straw kazoos. They see that when a ruler is struck, it vibrates, producing a sound. Drums are also used to show vibrations, as students watch grains of rice bouncing on the surface of the drum after it has been hit, and a laser pointer creates a laser show in the classroom when reflected off a vibrating mirror. Finally, students design a test that uses their sense of hearing to judge the effectiveness of different solids to transmit sound vibrations.

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

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

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

What happens when an excited atom emits a photon? What can we deduce about that atom based on the photons it can emit? A series of interactive models allows you to examine how the energy levels the electrons of an atom occupy affect the types of photons that can be emitted. Use a digital spectrometer to record which wavelengths certain atoms will emit, and then use this knowledge to compare and identify types of atoms. Students will be abe to:

Discusses the meaning of velocity in terms of a graphical representation. Calculus-based discussion. Good graphics.

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.

This activity allows students to brainstorm investigable questions, conduct an experiment, and communicate the results related to our invertebrate animal study; specifically sponges and absorption. (Lesson is based on an original activity from "Porifera's Porosity", Holt Science and Technology - Animals, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston 2002, pages 50-51.)

In this mini-lab students will use chromatography to compare the mobile phase and the stationary phases of different inks used in marking pens. They will also determine the polarity of the solvents and inks. Finally, the students will use their calculated information to solve a crime.

After using the historical development of the Standard Model to develop introductory understanding, students link to OPAL and DELPHI data archives from CERN to identify and study the tracks from elementary particles.

Students act as chemical engineers and use LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robotics to record temperatures and learn about the three states of matter. Properties of matter can be measured in various ways, including volume, mass, density and temperature. Students measure the temperature of water in its solid state (ice) as it is melted and then evaporated.

This video segment from IdahoPTV's D4K explains and gives examples of the 4 states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

This activity models the states of matter and students investigate those states with a balloon/straw rocket.

This whole-class activity will involve students in creating static electricity and developing a model to explain what happens when static electricity is formed from wool, plastic, and a paper clip.

Students will statistically analyze data gathered in reference to the Abraham Lincoln penny.

In this podcast, listen to a traditional Inuit tale about the seasonal light and darkness of the Arctic.

Students learn about contact stress and its applications in engineering. They are introduced to the concept of heavy loads, such as buildings, elephants, people and traffic, and learn how those heavy loads apply contact stress. Through the analysis of their own footprints, students determine their contact stress.