In this activity, students design an innovative human shelter that is inspired and informed by an animal structure. Each group is assigned an animal class, and they gather information about shelters used by the animals in that class. After researching the topic and brainstorming ideas, students build small prototypes (models) of the structures. Finally, they present their products, explaining what attribute of the animal structure influenced their design.

In this activity, students gain first-hand experience with the mechanical advantage of pulleys. Students are given the challenge of helping save a whale by moving it from an aquarium back to its natural habitat into the ocean. They set up different pulley systems, compare the theoretical and actual mechanical advantage of each and discuss their recommendations as a class.

This lesson will require students to practice measuring real-world objects in different units and evaluate the most effective units to use for solving problems.

In this lesson, students will build fluency using the language of measurement by collecting data about various plants in the outdoor classroom.

Students will develop measurement vocabulary and fluency by comparing the different heights of plants.

This lesson will require students to practice measuring real-world objects in different units and evaluate which are the most effective units for solving particular problems.

Students will use leaves to measure different plants in and around the garden.

Students observe and discuss a cup and pencil model of a cyclone to better understand the science behind how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

In this lesson, students will measure spaces in the outdoor classroom in metric units recorded as decimals and compare the measurements.

The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate Newton's third law of motion which states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction through a small wooden car. The Newton cars show how action/reaction works and how the mass of a moving object affects the acceleration and force of the system. Subsequently, the Newton cars provide students with an excellent analogy for how rockets actually work.

Students will be able to demonstrate the ability to use a variety of non-standard unit of measurements to measure the length of different objects around the outdoor classroom.

Using paper, paper clips and tape, student teams design flying/falling devices to stay in the air as long as possible and land as close as possible to a given target. Student teams use the steps of the engineering design process to guide them through the initial conception, evaluation, testing and re-design stages. The activity culminates with a classroom competition and scoring to evaluate how each team's design performed.

Students apply several methods developed to identify and interpret patterns to the identification of fingerprints. They look at their classmates' fingerprints, snowflakes, and "spectral fingerprints" of elements. They learn to identify each image as unique, yet part of a group containing recognizable similarities.

In this lesson, students will explore and record data about different plants that they observe. Students will then create a bar graph to reflect the data that that they collected. For example, a student might find 7 tomato plants, 5 cabbages, and 4 squash plants; their graph would reflect these numbers.

Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Student teams work through the engineering design process to build the turbines, analyze the performance of their turbines and make calculations to determine the most suitable locations to build dams.

Students are introduced to the physical concept of the colors of rainbows as light energy in the form of waves with distinct wavelengths, but in a different manner than traditional kaleidoscopes. Looking at different quantum dot solutions, they make observations and measurements, and graph their data. They come to understand how nanoparticles interact with absorbing photons to produce colors. They learn the dependence of particle size and color wavelength and learn about real-world applications for using these colorful liquids.

In this hands-on activity rolling a ball down an incline and having it collide into a cup the concepts of mechanical energy, work and power, momentum, and friction are all demonstrated. During the activity, students take measurements and use equations that describe these energy of motion concepts to calculate unknown variables, and review the relationships between these concepts.

Students examine collisions between two skateboards with different masses to learn about conservation of momentum in collisions.

Students will measure the dimensions of containers in the garden to determine the volume of soil and work out computations based off the volume.