Toxic Island: Design Devices to Deliver Goods
A classic engineering challenge involves designing and building devices that can deliver necessary goods to “Toxic Island,” an island that has been quarantined by the World Health Organization due to a nasty outbreak of disease. Working within specific constraints, including limited materials, middle school students follow the engineering design process to design, test, and improve a device that can deliver “medicine” and other vital supplies accurately and quickly without touching either the water or island.
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Tags: Biomedical Engineering, Class Activities, commerce, delivery, Design, engineering design challenge, Engineering Design Process, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plan, maker challenges, pandemic, public health
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Middle school students learn the concept of dead reckoning by using vectors to plot a course based on a time and speed, then correct their positions with vectors representing winds and currents. Includes a link to related activities on navigation and creating nautical charts.
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