Lesson: The Total Package
Posted on April 5th, 2010 by ASEE
Who hasn’t been frustrated by hard-to-open, clumsy containers?
Assuming the role of engineers, students learn about the design process and examine the packaging of everyday products. They then analyze a specific product and devise a better design, producing a written report that recommends helpful changes.
Filed under: Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plans | 1 Comment »
Tags: Design, Engineering Design Process, Industrial engineering, package design
Food processing requires a lot of engineering, from developing farm equipment to the automated baking and mixing machines used in prepared desserts. One of the most inventive stages comes toward the end, when the food is packaged. Johannah Frueh, a science teacher at Orange Charter School in Hillsborough, North Carolina, has incorporated the engineering behind designing and making food packaging into her seventh and eighth grade elective lab classes.
Students use modeling clay to make a boat that will float in a tub of water. The object is to build a boat that will hold as much weight as possible without sinking. In the process of designing and testing their boats, students discover some of the basic principles of boat design and gain first-hand experience with concepts such as buoyancy and density.
