Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments. Through three lessons, students come to better understand sound waves, including how they change with distance, travel through different mediums, and are enhanced or mitigated in designed sound environments. They are introduced to audio engineers who use their expert scientific knowledge to manipulate sound for music and film production. They see how the invention of the telephone pioneered communications engineering, leading to today's long-range communication industry and its worldwide impact. Students analyze materials for sound properties suitable for acoustic design, learning about the varied environments created by acoustical engineers. Hands-on activities include modeling the placement of microphones to create a specific musical image, modeling and analyzing a string telephone, and applyling what they've learned about sound waves and materials to model a controlled sound room.

In this lesson, students are introduced to communications engineers as people who enable long-range communication. In the lesson demonstration, students discuss the tendency of sound to diminish with distance and model this phenomenon using a slinky. Finally, Alexander Graham Bell is introduced as the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in communications engineering.

Students learn the decibel reading of various noises and why high-level readings damage hearing. Sound types and decibel readings are written on sheets of paper, and students arrange the sounds from the lowest to highest decibel levels. If available, a decibel meter can be used to measure sounds by students.

Students are provided with an understanding of sound and light waves through a "sunken treasure" theme a continuous storyline throughout the lessons. In the first five lessons, students learn about sound, and in the rest of the lessons, they explore light concepts. To begin, students are introduced to the concepts of longitudinal and transverse waves. Then they learn about wavelength and amplitude in transverse waves. In the third lesson, students learn about sound through the introduction of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds. Next, they learn all about echolocation what it is and how engineers use it to "see" things in the dark or deep underwater. The last of the five sound lessons introduces acoustics; students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.

Students follow the steps of the engineering design process to create their own ear trumpet devices (used before modern-day hearing aids), including testing them with a set of reproducible sounds. They learn to recognize different pitches, and see how engineers must test designs and materials to achieve the best amplifying properties.

The purpose of this task is to have students compute and interpret an expected value, and then use the information provided by the expected value to make a decision. The task is designed to encourage students to communicate their findings in a non-technical form in context.

To understand the challenges of satellite construction, student teams design and create model spacecraft to protect vital components from the harsh conditions found on Mercury and Venus. They use slices of butter in plastic eggs to represent the internal data collection components of the spacecraft. To discover the strengths and weaknesses of their designs, they test their unique thermal protection systems in a planet simulation test box that provides higher temperature and pressure conditions.

The students are to calculate the specific heat of three metal objects. Then they are to determine the type of metal.

Students use the spectrographs from the "Building a Fancy Spectrograph" activity to gather data about light sources. Using their data, they make comparisons between different light sources and make conjectures about the composition of a mystery light source.

What happens when an excited atom emits a photon? What can we deduce about that atom based on the photons it can emit? A series of interactive models allows you to examine how the energy levels the electrons of an atom occupy affect the types of photons that can be emitted. Use a digital spectrometer to record which wavelengths certain atoms will emit, and then use this knowledge to compare and identify types of atoms. Students will be abe to:

Students learn how using spectrographs helps people understand the composition of light sources. Using simple materials including holographic diffraction gratings, students create and customize their own spectrographs just like engineers. They gather data about different light sources, make comparisons between sources and theorize about their compositions. Before building spectrographs, students learn and apply several methods to identify and interpret patterns, specifically different ways of displaying visual spectra. They also use spectral data from the Cassini mission to Saturn and its moon, Titan, to determine the chemical composition of the planet's rings and its moon's atmosphere.

The purpose of this task is to allow students to demonstrate an ability to construct boxplots and to use boxplots as the basis for comparing distributions. The solution should directly compare the center, spread, and shape of the two distributions and comment on the high outlier in the northbound data set.

In a spin-off to studying about angular momentum, students use basic methods of comparative mythology to consider why spinning and weaving are common motifs in creation of myths and folktales. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world — concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.

This activity allows students to brainstorm investigable questions, conduct an experiment, and communicate the results related to our invertebrate animal study; specifically sponges and absorption. (Lesson is based on an original activity from "Porifera's Porosity", Holt Science and Technology - Animals, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston 2002, pages 50-51.)

Students see how potential energy (stored energy) can be converted into kinetic energy (motion). Acting as if they were engineers designing vehicles, they use rubber bands, pencils and spools to explore how elastic potential energy from twisted rubber bands can roll the spools. They brainstorm, prototype, modify, test and redesign variations to the basic spool racer design in order to meet different design criteria, ultimately facing off in a race competition. These simple-to-make devices store potential energy in twisted rubber bands and then convert the potential energy to kinetic energy upon release.

The purpose of this task is to present students with a context that can naturally be represented with an inequality and to explore the relationship between the context and the mathematical representation of that context; thus, this is an intended as an instructional task.

In this mini-lab students will use chromatography to compare the mobile phase and the stationary phases of different inks used in marking pens. They will also determine the polarity of the solvents and inks. Finally, the students will use their calculated information to solve a crime.

This is a rectangle subdivision task; ideally instead of counting each square. students should break the letters into rectangles, multiply to find the areas, and add up the areas. However, students should not be discouraged from using individual counting to start if they are stuck. Often students will get tired of counting and devise the shortcut method themselves.

Students design and build structures to support the weight of books for 15 seconds.

This activity is an investigation where students explore the properties of color and light, using mixtures of common everyday materials.