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.

In this activity, students reinforce their understanding of compound machines by building a catapult. This compound machine consists of a lever and a wheel-and-axel. Catapults have been designed by engineers for a variety of purposes from lifting boulders into the air for warfare to human beings for entertainment; the projectiles in this activity are grapes for a magic act. Given the building materials, students design and build their catapult to launch a grape a certain distance.

This lesson introduces students to the effects of magnetic fields in matter addressing permanent magnets, diamagnetism, paramagnetism, ferromagnetism, and magnetization. First students must compare the magnetic field of a solenoid to the magnetic field of a permanent magnet. Students then learn the response of diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ferromagnetic material to a magnetic field. Now aware of the mechanism causing a solid to respond to a field, students learn how to measure the response by looking at the net magnetic moment per unit volume of the material.

Students explore electromagnetism and engineering concepts using optimization techniques to design an efficient magnetic launcher. Groups start by algebraically solving the equations of motion for the velocity at the time when a projectile leaves a launcher. Then they test three different launchers, in which the number of coils used is different, measuring the range and comparing the three designs. Based on these observations, students record similarities and differences and hypothesize on the underling physics. They are introduced to Faraday's law and Lenz's law to explain the physics behind the launcher. Students brainstorm how these principals might be applied to real-world engineering problems.

This lesson ties the preceding lessons together and brings students back to the grand challenge question on MRI safety. During this lesson, students focus on the logistics of magnetic resonance imaging as well as the MRI hardware. Students can then integrate this knowledge with their acquired knowledge on magnetic fields to solve the challenge question.

The purpose of this task is for students to find different pairs of numbers that sum to 9.

In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the different between longitudinal and transverse waves.

This instructional task gives students a hands-on experience with composing and decomposing geometric figures.

Students learn about the difference between temperature and thermal energy. They build a thermometer using simple materials and develop their own scale for measuring temperature. They compare their thermometer to a commercial thermometer, and get a sense for why engineers need to understand the properties of thermal energy.

Night Sky Star Stories Makinak: The Turtle
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

This task is for students who know how to use base 10 blocks.

This task is a straightforward task related to adding fractions with the same denominator. The main purpose is to emphasize that there are many ways to decompose a fraction as a sum of fractions, similar to decompositions of whole numbers that students should have seen in earlier grades.

This tasks lends itself very well to multiple solution methods. Students may learn a lot by comparing different methods. Students who are already comfortable with fraction multiplication can go straight to the numeric solutions given below. Students who are still unsure of the meanings of these operations can draw pictures or diagrams.

Students redesign and justify the packaging used in consumer products. Design criteria include reducing the amount of packaging material by 25%.

This is the first of two fraction division tasks that use similar contexts to highlight the difference between the ŇNumber of Groups UnknownÓ a.k.a. ŇHow many groups?Ó (Variation 1) and ŇGroup Size UnknownÓ a.k.a. ŇHow many in each group?Ó (Variation 2) division problems.

This is the second of two fraction division tasks that use similar contexts to highlight the difference between the ŇNumber of Groups UnknownÓ a.k.a. ŇHow many groups?Ó (Variation 1) and ŇGroup Size UnknownÓ a.k.a. ŇHow many in each group?Ó (Variation 2) division problems.

As a weighted plastic egg is dropped into a tub of flour, students see the effect that different heights and masses of the same object have on the overall energy of that object while observing a classic example of potential (stored) energy transferred to kinetic energy (motion). The plastic egg's mass is altered by adding pennies inside it. Because the egg's shape remains constant, and only the mass and height are varied, students can directly visualize how these factors influence the amounts of energy that the eggs carry for each experiment, verified by measurement of the resulting impact craters. Students learn the equations for kinetic and potential energy and then make predictions about the depths of the resulting craters for drops of different masses and heights. They collect and graph their data, comparing it to their predictions, and verifying the relationships described by the equations. This classroom demonstration is also suitable as a small group activity.

The purpose of this instructional task is to motivate a discussion about adding fractions and the meaning of the common denominator. The different parts of the task have students moving back and forth between the abstract representation of the fractions and the meaning of the fractions in the context.

This task requires students to study the make-a-ten strategy that they should already know and use intuitively. In this strategy, knowledge of which sums make a ten, together with some of the properties of addition and subtraction, are used to evaluate sums which are larger than 10.

This task is to introduce students to the concept of reading an analog clock.