Students explore the menu genre by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants. They review adjectives and descriptive writing and then work in groups to create their own custom menus.

Students learn about using renewable energy from the Sun for heating and cooking as they build and compare the performance of four solar cooker designs. They explore the concepts of insulation, reflection, absorption, conduction and convection.

Student groups are given a set of materials: cardboard, insulating materials, aluminum foil and Plexiglas, and challenged to build solar ovens. The ovens must collect and store as much of the sun's energy as possible. Students experiment with heat transfer through conduction by how well the oven is insulated and radiation by how well it absorbs solar radiation. They test the effectiveness of their designs qualitatively by baking something and quantitatively by taking periodic temperature measurements and plotting temperature vs. time graphs. To conclude, students think like engineers and analyze the solar oven's strengths and weaknesses compared to conventional ovens.

While the task as written does not explicitly use the term "unit rate," most of the work students will do amounts to finding unit rates. A recipe context works especially well since there are so many different pair-wise ratios to consider.

PHYSICAL SCIENCE, STEM CAREERS
In this video, learn from chemical engineers Laura and Wade about what it takes to become a chemical engineer and why it's a great career. Find out how chemical engineers do things like save the environment, take waste and make it useful, and solve real-world problems every day.

ABOUT THE SCIENCE
What do disposable diapers, soda, hydrogen fuel cells, aluminum, penicillin and snowboards have in common? They were all invented or further processed by a chemical engineer!
Are you someone who likes to solve problems? Do you like making something new? Do you care about the environment? If so, being a chemical engineer might just be for you!
As an engineer in this field, you get to apply chemistry to the industrial process to make things. It takes technology, innovation, and ideas to help generate an end result.
An example of this is through making textiles out of weeds! As a chemical engineer, first you would put the weeds through a processing system, have them pulped, put through an extruder to create a fiber, and then voila! You can use that to create textiles. To ensure chemical engineers are being friendly to the environment, their decision making always considers renewable resources.

Science Background:
Encourage students to be creative in their problem-solving strategies, within the scope of the rules. Students will discover that any strategy that increases the amount of heat or increases the surface area of the ice will result in a faster melt. You might ask students how they would change their strategies if the ice cube were doubled in size, if they were melting a large block of ice, or if they were melting an equal mass of ice chips.
Materials: one ice cube for each student
Directions:
Melt an ice cube as fast as you can, using the following three rules:
1. You cannot put the ice cube in your mouth
2. You must collect as much of the melted water as possible (decide how you will collect the water)
3. You can only use what is at your desk right now

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Students learn the meaning of preservation and conservation and identify themselves and others as preservationists or conservationists in relation to specific environmental issues. They use Venn diagrams to clarify the similarities and differences in viewpoints. They see how an environmental point-of-view affects the approach to an engineering problem.

Free Online Math Games, Cool Puzzles, and More. Also check out out language, memory, jigsaw, geography and science games on the site.

These games support student development of the concept of ordered pairs as they play to win each game.

This is a set of three, one-page problems about how astronomers use coordinate systems. Learners will plot a constellation on a coordinate plane and/or plot the route of Mars Science Lab (MSL aka Curiosity) on the surface of Mars. Options are presented so that students may learn about the MSL mission through a NASA press release or about the coordinate plane by viewing a NASA eClips video [7 min.]. This activity is part of the Space Math multi-media modules that integrate NASA press releases, NASA archival video, and mathematics problems targeted at specific math standards commonly encountered in middle school.

An interactive applet and associated web page that describe the concept of the coordinate plane (Cartesian Plane). The applet shows the plane, its axes, origin and related controls. The user can drag a point around and see the coordinates change, and click anywhere to create new points. The origin can be dragged to emphasize or eliminate certain quadrants. The grid, axis pointers and coordinates can be turned on and off. The coordinate display can be turned off to permit class exercises and then turned back on the verify the answers. The applet can be printed as it appears on the screen to make handouts. The web page has a narrative description of the concept. Applet can be enlarged to full screen size for use with a classroom projector. This resource is a component of the Math Open Reference Interactive Geometry textbook project at http://www.mathopenref.com.

A brief refresher on the Cartesian plane includes how points are written in (x, y) format and oriented to the axes, and which directions are positive and negative. Then students learn about what it means for a relation to be a function and how to determine domain and range of a set of data points.

An interactive applet and associated web page that describe the concept of a point in coordinate geometry. The applet show one point initially, but clicking anywhere adds more. As the points are dragged, the coordinates are seen to change. The grid, axis pointers and coordinates can be turned on and off. The coordinate display can be turned off to permit class exercises and then turned back on the verify the answers. The applet can be printed as it appears on the screen to make handouts. The web page has a narrative description of the concept, including the definitions of abscissa, ordinate, coordinates, ordered pair. The applet can be enlarged to full screen size for use with a classroom projector. This resource is a component of the Math Open Reference Interactive Geometry textbook project at http://www.mathopenref.com.

An interactive applet and associated web page that demonstrate the concept of coplanar objects - those that lie in the same plane. The applet presents two planes. In one plane there are two rectangles that can be dragged around and which lie in the same plane always. The other is a rectangle that can be dragged but always lies in a plane orthogonal to the first. Applet can be enlarged to full screen size for use with a classroom projector. This resource is a component of the Math Open Reference Interactive Geometry textbook project at http://www.mathopenref.com.

This lesson introduces students to the idea of biomimicry or looking to nature for engineering ideas. Biomimicry involves solving human problems by mimicking natural solutions, and it works well because the solutions exist naturally. There are numerous examples of useful applications of biomimicry, and in this lesson we look at a few fun examples.