Flying T-Shirt Challenge
Posted on October 4th, 2017 by Mary Lord
Students follow the engineering design process to design and build a usable device to propel school T-shirts up into the stands during home sporting events while keeping costs under budget.
Filed under: Class Activities, Grades 6-8, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Grades 9-12, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plans | Comments Off on Flying T-Shirt Challenge
Tags: catapult, cheerleaders, Class Activities, Engineering Design Process, forces, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plan, maker challenges, motion, Physics, Sports, T-shirt cannon, teachengineering, tools
Hurricanes, earthquakes, and other destructive events offer timely “teachable moments” about the role of engineers in improving weather forecasts and reducing the toll from natural disasters. eGFI Teachers’s collection of activities, feature articles, and other resources can help you integrate engineering into your classes – and inspire the next generation of “crisis” engineers.
Working in groups of 8, middle school students use their senses to describe and predict the weather, then act as state park engineers and design/build “backyard weather stations” to gather data to make actual weather forecasts.
Middle school students learn about the Earth’s geometrical relation to the sun by calculating where the sun will be in the sky for any date or time given a particular location on Earth, such as their school. The three-activity module was developed by lighting engineer Tony Esposito, Ph.D., during his graduate studies at Pennsylvania State University and made available to eGFI Teachers.
eGFI caught up with lighting engineer Tony Esposito, who developed this month’s “solar geometry” lesson while earning a Ph.D. in architectural engineering at Pennsylvania State University, to learn more about his background and what sparked his interest in engineering and education. Check out his story – and tips for teachers!
Working in groups of three, middle school students learn about types of forces, the relationship between form and function, and the structure of the hand by working as biomedical engineers to design, build, and test their own hand “gripper” prototypes that can grasp and lift a 200 ml cup of sand.
High school students working in groups of three to four learn about the primary causes and impacts of coastal erosion, and use elevation data to construct profiles of a beach over time or to compare several beaches, make inferences about the erosion process, and discuss how humans should respond.
Students in grades 3 to 8 study coastal erosion and the apply the engineering design process to devise structures and policies to protect shorelines, taking public concerns into account.
Middle school students learn that ordinary people like themselves can make meaningful contributions to science by reviewing examples of citizen science projects on Zooniverse, an interactive website. They then form “engineering teams” to brainstorm projects for their own community and design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support them. 
