Students capture and examine air particles to gain an appreciation of how much dust, pollen and other particulate matter is present in the air around them. Students place "pollution detectors" at various locations to determine which places have a lot of particles in the air and which places do not have as many. Quantifying and describing these particles is a first step towards engineering methods of removing contaminants from the air.

Students develop an understanding of air pressure by using candy or cookie wafers to model how it changes with altitude, by comparing its magnitude to gravitational force per unit area, and by observing its magnitude with an aluminum can crushing experiment.

Students learn about pressure, employing it to crush cans and model the atmosphere.

In this activity, students will simulate the equal and unequal distribution of our renewable resources. Also, they will consider the impact of our increasing population upon these resources and how engineers develop technologies to create resources.

In which Stan Muller talks about some of the problems in Intellectual Property law as it exists today. He'll also teach you a little about how IP law applies to everyone's favorite media platform, YouTube. Lastly, he'll do a little prognosticating, and try to predict how IP law might change in the future.

This task illustrates the process of rearranging the terms of an expression to reveal different aspects about the quantity it represents, precisely the language being used in standard A-SSE.B.3.

This rich task is an excellent example of geometric concepts in a modeling situation and is accessible to all students. In this task, students will provide a sketch of a paper ice cream cone wrapper, use the sketch to develop a formula for the surface area of the wrapper, and estimate the maximum number of wrappers that could be cut from a rectangular piece of paper.

The purpose of this task is to engage students, probably working in groups, in a substantial and open-ended modeling problem. Students will have to brainstorm or research several relevant quantities, and incorporate these values into their solutions.

In this task students use algebraic methods to determine whether each of the functions is odd, even, or neither.

This task emphasizes the expectation that students know linear functions grow by constant differences over equal intervals and exponential functions grow by constant factors over equal intervals.

Gait analysis is the study of human motion that can be utilized as biometric information or identification, for medical diagnostics or for comparative biomechanics. In this activity, students observe walking human subjects and then discuss parameters that could be used to characterize walking gaits. They use accelerometers to collect and graph acceleration vs. time data that can help in gait analysis—all part of practicing the engineering data analysis process. Students complete this activity before learning the material presented in the associated lesson.

The goal of this task is to get students to focus on the shape of the graph of the equation y=ex and how this changes depending on the sign of the exponent and on whether the exponential is in the numerator or denominator. It is also intended to develop familiarity, in the case of f and k, with the functions which are used in logistic growth models, further examined in ``Logistic Growth Model, Explicit Case'' and ``Logistic Growth Model, Abstract Verson.''

The goal of this task is to work on finding multiples of some whole numbers.

This task requires students to determine whether a number is rational or irrational. The task assumes that students are able to express a given repeating decimal as a fraction.

In this task, students use trigonometric functions to model the movement of a point around a wheel and, in the case of part (c), through space (F-TF.5). Students also interpret features of graphs in terms of the given real-world context (F-IF.4).

This is a direct task suitable for the early stages of learning about exponential functions. Students interpret the relevant parameters in terms of the real-world context and describe exponential growth.

In this role-playing activity, students learn how cellular phone service works, its advantages and its limitations. Students also learn about the advantages and limitations of satellite phone service. Phone communication involves many aspects of science, math and engineering, and this activity conveys to students how these technologies help people to stay better connected. Students use what they learn to understand what communication options might be available for Maya and her parents, Spacewoman Tess and Spaceman Rohan.

As stated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and by numerous writers, activists, politicians, poets and Indigenous peoples themselves, a nation’s culture is central to its identity and viability. To understand how a culture can be affected by the presence of external forces, it’s important to understand the complexity of the word “culture.”

Students are asked to consider the expression that arises in physics as the combined resistance of two resistors in parallel. However, the context is not explicitly considered here. The task is good general preparation for problems more specifically aligned to either A-SSE.1 or A-SSE.2.

The purpose of this task is to help students see manipulation of expressions as an activity undertaken for a purpose.