A classroom auction reveals reservation prices and a demand curve for an introductory economics course.

Students are introduced to brainstorming and the design process in problem solving as it relates to engineering. They perform an activity to develop and understand problem solving with an emphasis on learning from history. Using only paper, straws, tape and paper clips, they create structures that can support the weight of at least one textbook. In their first attempts to build the structures, they build whatever comes to mind. For the second trial, they examine examples of successful buildings from history and try again.

Students gain experience and practice with three types of word problems using the "Take From" context: result unknown, change unknown, and start unknown.

This task requires students to be able to reason abstractly about fraction multiplication as it would not be realistic for them to solve it using a visual fraction model. Even though the numbers are too messy to draw out an exact picture, this task still provides opportunities for students to reason about their computations to see if they make sense.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students use weighted averages and data from air photos from 1939 to 2005 to calculate the rate of retreat of the shoreline and the advance of the front of dunes along the shoreline.

Students should think of different ways the cylindrical containers can be set up in a rectangular box. Through the process, students should realize that although some setups may seem different, they result is a box with the same volume. In addition, students should come to the realization (through discussion and/or questioning) that the thickness of a cardboard box is very thin and will have a negligible effect on the calculations.

In this task students use ratio and rate reasoning to solve a problem involving a sales item.

This is a foundational geometry task designed to provide a route for students to develop some fundamental geometric properties that may seem rather obvious at first glance. In this case, the fundamental property in question is that the shortest path from a point to a line meets the line at a right angle, which is crucial for many further developments in the subject.

This activity is an investigation of free fall and projectile motion through a track and field situation.

The purpose of this task is to have students complete normal distribution calculations and to use properties of normal distributions to draw conclusions. The task is designed to encourage students to communicate their findings in a narrative/report form in context Đ not just simply as a computed number.

This word problem is based estimating the height of a person over time. Note that there is a significant amount of rounding in the final answer. This is because people almost never report their heights more precisely than the closest half-inch. If we assume that the heights reported in the task stem are rounded to the nearest half-inch, then we should report the heights given in the solution at the same level of precision.

It is possible to say a lot about the solution to an equation without actually solving it, just by looking at the structure and operations that make up the equation. This exercise turns the focus away from the familiar Ňfinding the solutionÓ problem to thinking about what it really means for a number to be a solution of an equation.

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.

In this activity, learners build a simple mechanism that regulates the "escape" of energy released by a falling weight by portioning it into discrete amounts. Escapements are found in mechanical clocks, such as those driven by a pendulum or a spring. Learners will build the wrapping form of escapement said to be used in a fifteenth-century German clock.

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.

Through a five-lesson series with five activities, students are introduced to six simple machines inclined plane, wedge, screw, lever, pulley, wheel-and-axle as well as compound machines, which are combinations of two or more simple machines. Once students understand about work (work = force x distance), they become familiar with the machines' mechanical advantages, and see how they make work easier. Through an introduction to compound machines, students begin to think critically about machine inventions and their pervasive roles in our lives. After learning about Rube Goldberg contraptions absurd inventions that complete simple tasks in complicated ways they evaluate the importance and usefulness of the many machines around them. Through the hands-on activities, students draw designs for contraptions that could move a circus elephant into a rail car, create a construction site ramp design by measuring different inclined planes and calculating the ideal vs. actual mechanical advantage of each, compare the theoretical and actual mechanical advantages of different pulley systems conceived to save a whale, build and test grape catapults made with popsicle sticks and rubber bands, and follow the steps of the engineering design process to design and build Rube Goldberg machines.

An interactive lecture that uses flash animations showing the researcher and their experiments that were used to develop the basic concepts in Mendelian genetics. Includes multiple choice questions students can answer in class.

This activity describes a simple clear demonstration of electric generators (Faraday's Law) and electric motors (Lorentz Force). This demonstration can be used as an interactive lecture demonstration.

In this activity, students are challenged to design a contraption using simple machines to move a circus elephant into a rail car. After students consider their audience and constraints, they work in groups to brainstorm ideas and select one concept to communicate to the class.

In this activity, learners create a tiny electric, motorized dancer. Learners use the interactions of magnetism and electric current to make a wire spin, while displaying the Lorentz Force in action. This lesson guide provides one of many ways to build the spinner and links to other methods.