In this lesson, students discover the entire process that goes into designing a rocket for any customer. In prior lessons, students learned how rockets work, but now they learn what real-world decisions engineers have to make when designing and building a rocket. They learn about important factors such as supplies, ethics, deadlines and budgets. Also, students learn about the Engineering process, and recognize that the first design is almost never the final design. Re-Engineering is a critical step in creating a rocket.

This pathway provides an introduction to the scientific method in the context of the life sciences.

A guide to integrating conflict resolution education into youth arts programs. This program was created to give after school youth teachers tools to help youth solve disputes they see on a daily basis.

How does DNA perform those all-important functions of replication and protein synthesis? This interactive feature, from the Web site developed for the PBS series "A Science Odyssey," will help you explore and understand the secrets of DNA.

Young children practice jumping and landing while using proper arm movements to ensure safety and balance. At this website, find a description of the game, "Jump the River," including ideas for demonstrating it in class, ways of varying the activity to make it more fun and challenging, and suggestions for assessing students' efforts and adapting the game for students with disabilities.

One of the exciting challenges for engineers is the idea of exploration. This lesson looks more closely at Spaceman Rohan, Spacewoman Tess, their daughter Maya, and their challenges with getting to space, setting up satellites, and exploring uncharted waters via a canoe. This lesson reinforces rockets as a vehicle that helps us explore outside the Earth's atmosphere (i.e., to move without air) by using the principles of Newton's third law of motion. Also, the ideas of thrust, control and weight all principles that engineers deal with when building a rocket are introduced.

When the power goes out, it's time for action in our brand new game. Venture into the dark, explore different locations and meet new characters - creating your own unique adventure as you play! Use your science skills to get the power back on and see if you can discover the real reason behind the sudden darkness covering the whole town. This game puts you in control, it's your choices and decisions that will guide you through the story to discover the cause. Will you solve the mystery before it's too late?

Over the course of three sessions, students act as agricultural engineers and learn about the sustainable pest control technique known as soil biosolarization in which organic waste is used to help eliminate pests during soil solarization instead of using toxic compounds like pesticides and fumigants. Student teams prepare seed starter pots using a source of microorganisms (soil or compost) and “organic waste” (such as oatmeal, a source of carbon for the microorganisms). They plant seeds (representing weed seeds) in the pots, add water and cover them with plastic wrap. At experiment end, students count the weed seedlings and assess the efficacy of the soil biosolarization technique in inactivating the weed seeds. An experiment-guiding handout and pre/post quizzes are provided.

In this activity, students investigate the effect that fins have on rocket flight. Students construct two paper rockets that they can launch themselves by blowing through a straw. One "strawket" has wings and the other has fins. Students observe how these two control surfaces affect the flight of their strawkets. Students discover how difficult control of rocket flight is and what factors can affect it.

This resource provides statistical evidence, backgrounders, FAQs, climate impact reports, and suggested solutions to the global problem.

Students conduct a simple test to determine how many drops of each of three liquids water, rubbing alcohol, vegetable oil can be placed on a penny before spilling over. Because of their different surface tensions, more water can be piled on top of a penny than either of the other two liquids. However, the main point of the activity is for students to come up with an explanation for their observations about the different amounts of liquids a penny can hold. To do this, they create hypotheses that explain their observations, and because middle school students are not likely to have prior knowledge of the property of surface tension, their hypotheses are not likely to include this idea. Then they are asked to come up with ways to test their hypotheses, although they do not need to actually conduct these tests as part of this activity.