Through two lessons and five activities, students explore the structure and function of cell membranes. Specific transport functions, including active and passive transport, are presented. In the legacy cycle tradition, students are motivated with a Grand Challenge question. As they study the ingress and egress of particles through membranes, students learn about quantum dots and biotechnology through the concept of intracellular engineering.

Students are presented with a real-life problem as a challenge to investigate, research and solve. Specifically, they are asked to investigate why salt water helps a sore throat, and how engineers apply this understanding to solve other problems. Students read a medical journal article and listen to an audio talk by Dr. Z. L. Wang to learn more about quantum dots. After students reflect and respond to the challenge question, they conduct the associated activity to perform journaling and brainstorming.

This video segment highlights how the U.S. military is the single largest user of energy in the nation, but it is also trying to reduce its carbon bootprint. Scenes taped at Fort Irwin and Camp Pendleton show the Army and Marines experimenting with wind and solar in order to reduce the number of fuel convoys that are vulnerable to attack.

Students use a LEGO® ball shooter to demonstrate and analyze the motion of a projectile through use of a line graph. This activity involves using a method of data organization and trend observation with respect to dynamic experimentation with a complex machine. Also, the topic of line data graphing is covered. The main objective is to introduce students graphs in terms of observing and demonstrating their usefulness in scientific and engineering inquiries. During the activity, students point out trends in the data and the overall relationship that can be deduced from plotting data derived from test trials with the ball shooter.

A guide to amplify the wide variety of initiatives that put the library learning commons at the center of teacher and learning in a school. The acronym stands for Literacies, Information, Inquiry, Instruction, Innovation, Technology, Expertise, Service.

Join the ladybug in an exploration of rotational motion. Rotate the merry-go-round to change its angle, or choose a constant angular velocity or angular acceleration. Explore how circular motion relates to the bug's x,y position, velocity, and acceleration using vectors or graphs.

This lesson focuses on the importance of airplanes in today's society. Airplanes of all shapes and sizes are used for hundreds of different reasons, including recreation, commercial business, public transportation, and delivery of goods, among many others. From transporting people to crop-dusting, our society and our economy have come to depend on airplanes. Students will discuss their own experiences with airplanes and learn more about the role of airplanes in our world.

In a column devoted to interactive resoures for the K-5 classroom, this article features Recycle City, an EPA-produced, student-friendly web site designed to teach students about actions that create a sustainable community. Students will learn about recycling, reducing waste, and using less energy. The column regularly appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which focuses on the essential principles of climate literacy.

In Legend of the Lost Emerald, kids take on the role of maritime archaeologists exploring shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. Like real archaeologists, players use sonar and GPS coordinates, dive down to take underwater photos, and search for clues in historical artifacts, like letters and ship manifests, to tell the story of each shipwreck. We teamed up with maritime archaeologists at Wisconsin Sea Grant and amazing teacher fellows from across the state of Wisconsin to design a game that works in the classroom and introduces kids to the tools and practices of the field.

Teachers can use this game to introduce kids to historical practices and themes from ecology, technology, and Wisconsin history. Students will learn about the role of maritime archaeologists, archivists, historians, and museum curators. The game introduces four different time periods in maritime history, ranging from wooden schooners in the mid-1800s to steel freighters in the 1960s.

Despite major cultural, legal, and medical impediments the use of birth control, including abortion, by American women was widespread at the turn of the century. In their quest to control unwanted pregnancies, American women could be surprisingly resourceful in the methods they used. In this audio excerpt from a 1974 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Miriam Allen deFord described methods of birth control in vogue in the 1910s, including spermicides, douches, the Dutch pessary (an early diaphragm), and the use of ergot pills to induce abortion.

Students observe and discuss a vacuum cleaner model of a baghouse to better understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

Working as a team, students discover that the value of pi (3.1415926...) is a constant and applies to all different sized circles. The team builds a basic robot and programs it to travel in a circular motion. A marker attached to the robot chassis draws a circle on the ground as the robot travels the programmed circular path. Students measure the circle's circumference and diameter and calculate pi by dividing the circumference by the diameter. They discover the pi and circumference relationship; the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter is the value of pi.

This activity is an introduction to the concept of levers, the classes, and their parts using the musculoskeletal system.

In this lesson, students learn about the physical properties of the Moon. They compare these to the properties of the Earth to determine how life would be different for astronauts living on the Moon. Using their understanding of these differences, they are asked to think about what types of products engineers would need to design for us to live comfortably on the Moon.

Students learn about the weighted mean by building spreadsheets that apply this concept to the average density of the oceanic lithosphere.

In this math meets engineering activity, learners make paper airplanes and explore attributes related to increasing flight distances. Each learner collects data from three flights of the airplane and finds the median distance. Learners then collect, organize, display, and interpret the median distances for the group in a stem-and-leaf plot. This lesson guide includes questions for learners, assessment options, extensions, and reflection questions.

AIDS emerged as a health crisis in the 1980's and early 1990's. While many Americans initially associated the disease with gay men, ignorance about AIDS contributed to its rapid spread, first to intravenous drug users and then to heterosexuals. The lack of information available to people at risk particularly affected health workers like Lorraine Theibaud, a registered nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. Theibaud and her colleagues, fearful about contracting or spreading the disease, were not given adequate information or training on how to protect themselves or their patients. When she discovered safety methods and technology that were not available at her hospital, Theibaud organized health workers to demand access to new safety techniques. Her campaign worked, winning workers new safety training and a permanent monitoring committee.

Hear from David Blechl, (Northwestern Mutual); Brooke Schoenherr, (Milwaukee Bucks); and Kat Kuester, (Concurrency). Moderated by Julie Walker (UW-Milwaukee). The following videos will give you a look into the variety of tech jobs and careers available to you and how you can prepare for them. Watch one - or all - and hear from experts who are doing these jobs today. As you watch the videos, download our workbook at https://bit.ly/MKEWorksheet to help you reflect on each career path and if that might be the right one for you some day!

Can you avoid the boulder field and land safely, just before your fuel runs out, as Neil Armstrong did in 1969? Our version of this classic video game accurately simulates the real motion of the lunar lander with the correct mass, thrust, fuel consumption rate, and lunar gravity. The real lunar lander is very hard to control.

Students begin working on the grand challenge of the unit by thinking about the nature of metals and quick, cost-effective means of separating different metals, especially steel. They arrive at the idea, with the help of input from relevant sources, to use magnets, but first they must determine if the magnets can indeed isolate only the steel.