How do you know if a chemical equation is balanced? What can you change to balance an equation? Play a game to test your ideas!

Emphasizing the design, build, and test steps of the engineering design process, groups create a ping-pong paddle. After building their paddle, students conduct tests and compare their design to a store-bought paddle and use a Venn diagram to organize their information. Based on their results, students write product reviews for their paddle. This project allows students to build and test a design, iterate upon that design as well as explore how data analysis of a product works.

Students learn about the engineering design process and how it is used to engineer products for everyday use. Students individually brainstorm solutions for sorting coins and draw at least two design ideas. They work in small groups to combine ideas and build a coin sorter using common construction materials such as cardboard, tape, straws and fabric. Students test their coin sorters, make revisions and suggest ways to improve their designs. By designing, building, testing and improving coin sorters, students come to understand how the engineering design process is used to engineer products that benefit society.

Students are introduced to polymer science and take on the role of chemical engineers to create and test a plastic made from starch. After testing their potato-based plastic, students design a product that takes advantage of the polymer’s unique properties. At the end of the engineering design process, students present their product in a development “pitch” that communicates their idea to potential investors.

Students combine art, gaming culture and engineering by fabricating light-up patches to increase youngsters’ visibility at night. The open-ended project is presented as a hypothetical design challenge: Students are engineers who have been asked by a group of parents whose children go out Pokémon hunting at night to create glowing patches that they adhere to clothing or backpacks to help vehicle drivers see the kids in the dark. Student pairs create Pokémon character stencil designs cut from iron-on fabric patches, adding transparent layers for color. Placed over an EL (electroluminescent) panel that is connected to a battery pack, the stencils create glowing designs. Each team creates a circuit, which includes lengthening the EL panel wiring to make it easier to wear. Then they sew/adhere the patches onto hoodies, messenger bags, hats, pockets or other applications they dream up. The project concludes with team presentations as if to an audience of project clients. Keep the project simple by hand cutting and ironing/sewing, or use cutting machines, laser cutters and sewing machines, if available.

Students learn basic marketing concepts and use professional marketing techniques to compose an advertisement for a hybrid vehicle. In the process, they learn the principles of comparative analysis.

Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how engineers use this technique to determine the environmental impact of everyday products and processes. As they examine what’s involved in making and consuming cupcakes, a snack enjoyed by millions of people every year, students learn about the production, use and disposal phases of an object’s life cycle. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materials, oven baking, frosting, liner disposal—and calculate energy usage and greenhouse gases emitted from making one cupcake. They use ratios and fractions, and compare options for some of the life-cycle stages, such as different paper wrapper endings (disposal to landfills or composting) in order to make a life-cycle plan with a lower environmental impact. This activity opens students’ eyes to see the energy use in the cradle-to-grave lives of everyday products. Pre/post-quizzes, worksheets, activity cards, Excel® workbook and visual aids are provided.

Students investigate the life cycles of engineered products and how they impact the environment. They use a basic life cycle assessment method that assigns fictional numerical values for different steps in the life cycle. Then they use their analyses to compare the impacts of their products to other products, and suggest ways to reduce environmental impact based on their analyses.

Students work as if they are electrical engineers to program a keyboard to play different audible tones depending on where a sensor is pressed. They construct the keyboard from a soft potentiometer, an Arduino capable board, and a small speaker. The soft potentiometer “keyboard” responds to the pressure of touch on its eight “keys” (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) and feeds an input signal to the Arduino-capable board. Each group programs a board to take the input and send an output signal to the speaker to produce a tone that is dependent on the input signal—that is, which “key” is pressed. After the keyboard is working, students play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and (if time allows) modify the code so that different keys or a different number of notes can be played.