Student teams investigate the properties of electromagnets. They create their own small electromagnet and experiment with ways to change its strength to pick up more paper clips. Students learn about ways that engineers use electromagnets in everyday applications.

Students learn about viscoelastic material behavior, such as strain rate dependence and creep, by using silly putty, an easy-to-make polymer material. They learn how to make silly putty, observe its behavior with different strain rates, and then measure the creep time of different formulations of silly putty. By seeing the viscoelastic behavior of silly putty, students start to gain an understanding of how biological materials function. Students gain experience in data collection, graph interpretation, and comparison of material properties to elucidate material behavior. It is recommended that students perform Part 1of the activity first (making and playing with silly putty), then receive the content and concept information in the associated lesson, and then complete Part 2 of the activity (experimenting and making measurements with silly putty).

Students practice crossing from one family to the next in counting forward with this concentration game.

This word problem requires students to create expressions to calculate gas milage for a vehicle.

In this Cyberchase video segment, Shari Spotter gets help from the CyberSquad in doubling a recipe for crumpets.

One common mistake students make when dividing fractions using visuals is the confusion between remainder and the fractional part of a mixed number answer.

Using a website simulation tool, students build on their understanding of random processes on networks to interact with the graph of a social network of individuals and simulate the spread of a disease. They decide which two individuals on the network are the best to vaccinate in an attempt to minimize the number of people infected and "curb the epidemic." Since the results are random, they run multiple simulations and compute the average number of infected individuals before analyzing the results and assessing the effectiveness of their vaccination strategies.

Students learn about biomedical engineering while designing, building and testing prototype surgical tools to treat cancer. Students also learn that if cancer cells are not removed quickly enough during testing, a cancerous tumor may grow exponentially and become more challenging to eliminate. Students practice iterative design as they improve their surgical tools during the activity.

With your mouse, drag data points and their error bars, and watch the best-fit polynomial curve update instantly. You choose the type of fit: linear, quadratic, cubic, or quartic. The reduced chi-square statistic shows you when the fit is good. Or you can try to find the best fit by manually adjusting fit parameters.

The purpose of this task is to introduce or reinforce the concept of a function, especially in a context where the function is not given by an explicit algebraic representation. Further, the last part of the task emphasizes the significance of one variable being a function of another variable in an immediately relevant real-life context.

The purpose of this task is to help students explore the meaning of fraction division and to connect it to what they know about whole-number division.

This task asks the students to solve a real-world problem involving unit rates (data per unit time) using units that many teens and pre-teens have heard of but may not know the definition for. While the computations involved are not particularly complex, the units will be abstract for many students.

Students explore the many different ways that engineers provide natural lighting to interior spaces. They analyze various methods of daylighting by constructing model houses from foam core board and simulating the sun with a desk lamp. Teams design a daylighting system for their model houses based on their observations and calculations of the optimal use of available sunlight to their structure.

This unit is an EQuIP Exemplar for adult education (http://achieve.org/equip). Students will connect their prior, real-world knowledge to the concept of order in mathematics. They will go through a discovery process with content that will build a deep, conceptual understanding of the properties of operations to explain why we perform operations in a certain order when we see just the naked numbers.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to use linear inequalities to create a set of solutions. In particular, the lesson will help teachers identify and assist students who have difficulties in: representing a constraint by shading the correct side of the inequality line; and understanding how combining inequalities affects a solution space.

Students learn about nanocomposites, compression and strain as they design and program robots that compress materials. Student groups conduct experiments to determine how many LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT motor rotations it takes to compress soft nanocomposites, including mini marshmallows, Play-Doh®, bread and foam. They measure the length and width of their nanocomposite objects before and after compression to determine the change in length and width as a function of motor rotation.