This lesson introduces the concepts of wavelength and amplitude in transverse waves. In the associated activity, students will use ropes and their bodies to investigate different wavelengths and amplitudes.

In this activity, students use a variety of materials to design and create headphones that absorb sound.

In this activity, students construct their own pinhole camera to observe the behavior of light.

As a class, students work through an example showing how DNA provides the "recipe" for making our body proteins. They see how the pattern of nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine) forms the double helix ladder shape of DNA, and serves as the code for the steps required to make genes. They also learn some ways that engineers and scientists are applying their understanding of DNA in our world.

In this activity, students will experience echolocation themselves. They actually try echolocation by wearing blindfolds while another student makes snapping noises in front of, behind, or to the side of them.

Students examine various materials to investigate how they interact with light. They use five characteristics—translucency, transparency, opaqueness, reflectivity and refractivity—to describe how light interacts with the objects.

In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the different between longitudinal and transverse waves.

In this lesson, students learn about sound. Girls and boys are introduced to the concept of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds.

This is the first lesson of this unit to introduce light. Lessons 1-5 focus on sound, while 6-9 focus on light. In this lesson, students learn the five words that describe how light interacts with objects: "transparent," "translucent," "opaque," "reflection" and "refraction."

In this lesson, students learn that light travels in a straight line from a light source and that ray diagrams help us understand how an image will be created by a lens. In the accompanying activity, students explore the concepts behind the workings of a pinhole camera.

In this lesson, students learn about echolocation: what it is and how engineers use it to "see" things in the dark, or deep underwater. Also, they learn how animals use echolocation to catch their dinner and travel the ocean waters and skies without running into things.

In this activity, students act as power engineers by specifying the power plants to build for a community. They are given a budget, an expected power demand from the community, and different power plant options with corresponding environmental effects. They can work through this scenario as a class or on their own.

This lesson provides students with an overview of the electric power industry in the United States. Students also become familiar with the environmental impacts associated with a variety of energy sources.

In this activity, students play the game Simon Says to make the amplitudes and wavelengths defined by the teacher. First they play alone, and then they play with a partner using a piece of rope.

Students work with partners to create four different instruments to investigate the frequency of the sounds they make. Teams may choose to make a shoebox guitar, water-glass xylophone, straw panpipe or a soda bottle organ (or all four!). Conduct this activity in conjunction with Lesson 3 of the Sound and Light unit.

This lesson introduces the concepts of longitudinal and transverse waves. Students see several demonstrations of waves and characterize them by transverse and longitudinal behavior. This lesson also introduces the Sunken Treasure theme of the Sound and Light unit a continuous story line throughout the lessons.

This is the last of five sound lessons, and it introduces acoustics as the science of studying and controlling sound. Students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.

In this lesson, the electromagnetic spectrum is explained and students learn that visible light makes up only a portion of this wide spectrum. Students also learn that engineers use electromagnetic waves for many different applications.

Students make simple spectroscopes (prisms) to look at different light sources. The spectroscopes allow students to see differing spectral distributions of different light sources. Students also shine a light source through different materials with varying properties and compare the differences.

Students use DNA profiling to determine who robbed a bank. After they learn how the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is used to match crime scene DNA with tissue sample DNA, students use CODIS principles and sample DNA fragments to determine which of three suspects matches evidence obtain at a crime location. They communicate their results as if they were biomedical engineers reporting to a police crime scene investigation.