In this interactive activity from the Building Big Web site, investigate dams in distress and decide if they should be repaired, removed, or left alone.

In this video from KQED's QUEST, find out how researchers have engineered a stove that is helping women in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man to his proper place in the army--and by extension his place in life--suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard work. Walter Lippmann, an influential political commentator and journalist, skewered the army intelligence tests in a series of six essays that appeared in the New Republic in 1922. He denounced as "nonsense" the claim that the average mental age of an American adult was fourteen years, and forcefully warned his readers of the danger of uncritical acceptance of IQ as destiny. He addressed the conditions of IQ testing, the possible biases of army intelligence tests, and the larger social problems raised by such classifications.

Students learn about and practice converting between fractions, decimals and percentages. Using a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robot and a touch sensor, each group inputs a fraction of its choosing. Team members convert this same fraction into a decimal, and then a percentage via hand calculations, and double check their work using the NXT robot. Then they observe the robot moving forward and record that distance. Students learn that the distance moved is a fraction of the full distance, based on the fraction that they input, so if they input ½, the robot moves half of the original distance. From this, students work backwards to compute the full distance. Groups then compete in a game in which they are challenged to move the robot as close as possible to a target distance by inputting a fraction into the NXT bot.

This activity is an inquiry lab where students are challenged to create a slow moving and fast moving plane and measure the speed.

In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members make a bridge from a single piece of paper. Will it be strong enough to hold a hundred pennies?

This is a math-science integrated unit about spectrographs. Learners will find and calculate the angle that light is transmitted through a holographic diffraction grating using trigonometry. After finding this angle, the students will build their own spectrographs in groups and research and design a ground or space-based mission using their creation. After the project is complete, student groups will present to the class on their trials, tribulations, and findings during this process. The activity is part of Project Spectra, a science and engineering program for middle-high school students, focusing on how light is used to explore the Solar System.

Students acquire a basic understanding of the science and engineering of space travel as well as a brief history of space exploration. They learn about the scientists and engineers who made space travel possible and briefly examine some famous space missions. Finally, they learn the basics of rocket science (Newton's third law of motion), the main components of rockets and the U.S. space shuttle, and how engineers are involved in creating and launching spacecraft.

This course emphasizes dynamic models of growth and development. Topics covered include: migration, modernization, and technological change; static and dynamic models of political economy; the dynamics of income distribution and institutional change; firm structure in developing countries; development, transparency, and functioning of financial markets; privatization; and banks and credit market institutions in emerging markets.

At MIT, this course was team taught by Prof. Robert Townsend, who taught for the first half of the semester, and Prof. Abhijit Banerjee, who taught during the second half. On OCW we are only including materials associated with sessions one through 13, which comprise the first half of the class.

" Topics include productivity effects of health, private and social returns to education, education quality, education policy and market equilibrium, gender discrimination, public finance, decision making within families, firms and contracts, technology, labor and migration, land, and the markets for credit and savings."

Role of the engineer as patent expert and as technical witness in court and patent interference and related proceedings. Rights and obligations of engineers in connection with educational institutions, government, and large and small businesses. Various manners of transplanting inventions into business operations, including development of New England and other US electronics and biotech industries and their different types of institutions. American systems of incentive to creativity apart from the patent laws in the atomic energy and space fields. For graduate students only; others see 6.901.

In this segment from Curious, learn about creating energy from solar rays to meet the growing energy needs of the world.

This document matches digital citizenship lessons to the Wisconsin Technology Standards for grades 3-5.

This book was written by two artist educators who teach digital art and design studio foundation classes. While teaching classes that take place in software laboratories, we noticed that many of our students expected to learn to use software, but gave little consideration to aesthetics or art and design history. A typical first day question is, "Are we going to learn Photoshop in this class?" This book is a mash-up of the Bauhaus Basic Course and open source software such as Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox, and Processing. We have taken some of the visual principles and exercises from the Bauhaus Basic Course and adapted them into exercises for these applications.

This resource provides a checklist to use as a guide when selecting digital tools and an evaluation rubric to be filled out to determine the educational effectiveness of the tool once its been introduced into the curriculum.

Students disassemble and analyze retractable pens. Through the process of "reverse engineering," they learn how the ink pens work.

Students discover the mathematical constant phi, the golden ratio, through hands-on activities. They measure dimensions of "natural objects"—a star, a nautilus shell and human hand bones—and calculate ratios of the measured values, which are close to phi. Then students learn a basic definition of a mathematical sequence, specifically the Fibonacci sequence. By taking ratios of successive terms of the sequence, they find numbers close to phi. They solve a squares puzzle that creates an approximate Fibonacci spiral. Finally, the instructor demonstrates the rule of the Fibonacci sequence via a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robot equipped with a pen. The robot (already created as part of the companion activity, The Fibonacci Sequence & Robots) draws a Fibonacci spiral that is similar to the nautilus shape.

This is an investigation where students observe what happens to land after it is mined. Students will create a hypothesis, observe their model, conclude what happens to land after it is mined, and discover the role humans play in land conservation.

This course examines the growing importance of medicine in culture, economics and politics. It uses an historical approach to examine the changing patterns of disease, the causes of morbidity and mortality, the evolution of medical theory and practice, the development of hospitals and the medical profession, the rise of the biomedical research industry, and the ethics of health care in America.

The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to new forms of popular humor, humor with a sophisticated edge drawn from a more prosperous, cosmopolitan urban experience. In New York, a circle of urbane humorists with a national audience rose around the New Yorker magazine and the famous "Algonquin Round Table," an informal group that met occasionally at the Algonquin Hotel. Ironic, witty, emphasizing word play and "in jokes," the New Yorker work of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and Dorothy Parker satirized the pretensions of ordinary middle-class life. "Do Insects Think?," a 1922 essay by Robert Benchley, gleefully mocked the pretentious tone of American science, as well as the cult of pep, productivity, and activity that characterized the 1920s. Doing nothing, it suggested, offered the best evidence of intelligence.