Students review information learned during the past five lessons and activities of the Introduction to Engineering unit. Working in teams, they create flyers and short quizzes about various types of engineering to share with the class and collect into a "Olympic Engineering Binder" for the class to keep.

Air is one of Earth's most precious resources, and we need to take care of it in order to preserve the environment and protect human health. To this end, students develop their understanding of visible air pollutants with an incomplete combustion demonstration, a "smog in a jar" demonstration, and by building simple particulate matter collectors.

In the first of two lessons of this curricular unit, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Student teams use spring scales to drag objects, such as a ceramic coffee cup, along a table top or the floor, measuring the frictional force that exists between the moving object and the surface it slides on. By modifying the bottom surface of the object, students find out what kinds of surfaces generate more or less friction. They also discover that both static and kinetic friction are involved when an object initially at rest is caused to slide across a surface. In the second lesson of the unit, students design and conduct experiments to determine the effects of weight and surface area on friction. They discover that weight affects normal friction (the friction that results from surface roughness), but for very smooth surfaces, the friction due to molecular attraction is affected by contact area.

This task contrasts the usefulness of four equivalent expressions. Students first have to confirm that the given expressions for the radioactive substance are equivalent. Then they have to explain the significance of each expression in the context of the situation.

Students take a closer look at cars and learn about some characteristics that affect their energy efficiency, including rolling resistance and the aerodynamics of shape and size. They come to see how vehicles are one example of a product in which engineers are making changes and improvements to gain greater efficiency and thus require less energy to operate.

Students model and design the sound environment for a room. They analyze the sound performance of different materials that represent wallpaper, thick curtains, and sound-absorbing panels. Then, referring to the results of their analysis, they design another room based on certain specifications, and test their designs.

The activities in this lesson will help students compare and understand the three types of fossils: preserved organisms, mineral replacement fossils, and impression fossils.

Students will use their knowledge about fossils to arrange fossil pictures in sequence from oldest to youngest.

Students will act as paleontologists and attempt to figure out the environment where various fossils would have existed.

In this measurement lesson plan students use their estimation and reasoning skills to develop benchmarks for an ounce and a pound. Students test the accuracy of their estimates using a scale and give themselves a score based on how close they came to the desired weight (an ounce or a pound). This lesson plan includes a student data collection worksheet (PDF).

" This course explores the foundations of policy making in developing countries. The goal is to spell out various policy options and to quantify the trade-offs between them. We will study the different facets of human development: education, health, gender, the family, land relations, risk, informal and formal norms and institutions. This is an empirical class. For each topic, we will study several concrete examples chosen from around the world. While studying each of these topics, we will ask: What determines the decisions of poor households in developing countries? What constraints are they subject to? Is there a scope for policy (by government, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs))? What policies have been tried out? Have they been successful?"

There is a natural (and complicated!) predator-prey relationship between the fox and rabbit populations, since foxes thrive in the presence of rabbits, and rabbits thrive in the absence of foxes. However, this relationship, as shown in the given table of values, cannot possibly be used to present either population as a function of the other. This task emphasizes the importance of the "every input has exactly one output" clause in the definition of a function, which is violated in the table of values of the two populations.

The example of rabbits and foxes was introduced in the task (8-F Foxes and Rabbits) to illustrate two functions of time given in a table. We are now in a position to actually model the data given previously with trigonometric functions and investigate the behavior of this predator-prey situation.

The example of rabbits and foxes was introduced in 8-F Foxes and Rabbits to illustrate two functions of time given in a table. The same situation was used in F-TF Foxes and Rabbits 2 to find trigonometric functions modeling the data in the table. The previous situation was somewhat unrealistic since we were able to find functions that fit the data perfectly. In this task, on the other hand, we do some legitimate modelling, in that we come up with functions that approximate the data well, but do not perfectly match, the given data.

Using this tool, students build these classic fractals: the Koch snowflake, a fractal tree, a reduced square, and the Sierpinksi triangle. As these shapes grow and change using an iterative process, students can observe patterns in the images created and in the table of values as the fractals progress through several stages.

In this lesson plan students use fraction bars to explore and compare the sizes of fractions. The lesson includes an activity sheet, answer key, guiding questions and prompts, assessment options and extensions, and a link to Fraction Feud, an interactive game (cataloged separately and listed as a related resource).

This applet allows students to individually practice working with relationships among fractions and ways of combining fractions. It is an online, one person game, with immediate feedback on incorrect moves. All instructions for this fun visual game are included and illustrated.

Explore different representations for fractions. This applet allows students to create a fraction,then see it as a visual model, and as percent and decimal equivalents. They can choose the model to be a circle, a rectangle, or a set model. Intended for the young learner, this version restricts the numerator to values from 0 to 20, and the denominator to benchmark values of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 20.

This lesson fosters a student's conceptual fraction sense with proper fractions, improper fractions, and mixed numbers by placing thirty fraction cards in order between given whole numbers on a number line clothesline. Users will visually identify that all proper fractions are grouped between zero and one, and that improper fractions or mixed numbers are all grouped above one. Users also play an estimation game with groups using the same principle. Instructional plan, questions for the students, assessment options, extensions, and teacher reflections are given.