Students determine their carbon footprints by answering questions about their everyday lifestyle choices. Then they engineer plans to reduce them. Students learn about their personal impacts on global climate change and how they can help the environment.

Students learn the importance of heat transfer and heat conductance. Using hot plates, student groups measure the temperature change of a liquid over a set time period and use the gathered data to calculate the heat transfer that occurs. Then, as if they were engineers, students pool their results to discuss and determine the best fluid to use in a car radiator.

The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate how drag affects falling objects. Students will make a variety of shapes out of paper and see how size and shape affects the speed with which their paper shapes fall.

With an introduction to the ideas of energy, students discuss specific types of energy and the practical sources of energy. Hands-on activities help them identify types of energy in their surroundings and enhance their understanding of energy.

During this activity, students learn how oil is formed and where in the Earth we find it. Students take a core sample to look for oil in a model of the Earth. They analyze their sample and make an informed decision as to whether or not they should "drill for oil" in a specific location.

With the help of simple, teacher-led demonstration activities, students learn the basic physics of heat transfer by means of conduction, convection, and radiation. They also learn about examples of heating and cooling devices, from stove tops to car radiators, that they encounter everyday in their homes, schools, and modes of transportation. Since in our everyday lives there are many times that we want to prevent heat transfer, students also consider ways that conduction, convection, and radiation can be reduced or prevented from occurring.

Students act as food science engineers as they explore and apply their understanding of cooling rate and specific heat capacity by completing two separate, but interconnected, tasks. In Part 1, student groups conduct an experiment to explore the cooling rate of a cup of hot chocolate. They collect and graph data to create a mathematical model that represents the cooling rate, and use an exponential decay regression to determine how long a person should wait to drink the cup of hot chocolate at an optimal temperature. In Part 2, students investigate the specific heat capacity of the hot chocolate. They determine how much energy is needed to heat the hot chocolate to an optimal temperature after it has cooled to room temperature. Two activity-guiding worksheets are included.

In this activity students trace the sources of their electricity, heating and cooling, and other components of their energy use though the use of their family's utility bills and information from utility and government websites.

In this learning activity, students analyze various sources of information to determine the best location for a new wind farm.

Students are introduced to the concept of a dam and its potential benefits, which include water supply, electricity generation, flood control, recreation and irrigation. This lesson begins an ongoing classroom scenario in which student engineering teams working for the Splash Engineering firm design dams for a fictitious client, Thirsty County.

Students will learn the difference between global, prevailing and local winds. In this activity, students will make a wind vane out of paper, a straw and a soda bottle and use it to measure wind direction over time. Finally, they will analyze their data to draw conclusions about the prevailing winds in their area.

Students learn about wind energy by making a pinwheel to model a wind turbine. Just like engineers, they decide where and how their turbine works best by testing it in different areas of the playground.

Video introduces wind energy research at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and provides an overview of the NREL Wind Technology Center near Boulder, Colorado.

In this activity, students use Google Earth to investigate ideal features of wind farms.

This is a utility-scale, land-based map of the mean annual wind speed 80 meters above the ground. This map can be used to evaluate the potential for wind energy in the US. State maps and more information are linked from the main map.

In this activity, students develop an understanding of how engineers use wind to generate electricity. They will build a model anemometer to better understand and measure wind speed.

This activity introduces wind energy concepts through a reading passage and by answering assessment questions. The main section of the activity involves constructing and testing a windmill to observe how design and position affect the electrical energy produced.

Students learn how engineers transform wind energy into electrical energy by building their own miniature wind turbines and measuring the electrical current it produces. They explore how design and position affect the electrical energy production.

Students go through the design process and the scientific process to test the effect of blade design on power output. There is an optional extension to use the data to create an optimal set of wind turbine blades.

The teacher-designed project described on this Google Site can be used to introduce students to the engineering design process while they learn about energy.  The lesson begins with inviting students to play the role of engineers that are asked to design and build a model wind turbine for a specified location in California.  All project documents are editable and could be modified for local interests for the students.  The project resources include ideas for scaffolding each phase of the design process to support all learners and assessment resources.