Search Results

Learn how to make and fly a paper helicopter! This simple activity includes a template (for the copter "blades") and instructions for folding, flying, and testing designs.

In this activity, learners use their imaginations and experiment with different materials to create bug hats.

Coins are everyday objects which tell a lot about the people who use them.

Design and create an optical illusion toy that makes two pictures appear to become one. This is called a thaumatrope and will allow the learner to investigate the phenomenon of persistence of vision.

In this activity, learners construct three quick and simple mechanisms to start building a pop-up book. Learners fold, cut, and glue paper to make a bird beak, parallelogram, and V-fold.

In this activity, learners explore the question "What is paper?" Learners discover the processes and materials required to make paper while experimenting with different recycled fibers and tools.

In this activity, learners slide shapes to create unusual tiled patterns.

In this activity, learners create a traditional Mexican noisemaker (a matraca) using cardboard, craft sticks, and a wooden dowel.

In this hands-on engineering project, kids use two simple machines, levers and inclined planes, to construct their own pinball machines.

In this activity, learners build a simple tabletop seesaw to test how different variables (the position of the fulcrum, distance, weight) affect its balance under increasing weight loads.

In this activity, learners build small animated toys that move.

In this project, students explore how levers work, by making a puppet with moving limbs.

In this activity, learners create night lights using a plastic cup, programmable PICO Cricket, tri-color LED, and sensor.

In this activity, learners take a turn contributing a closed figure made of six squares to a large grid; each must be different from all the others on the grid so far.

In this activity, learners build a mini crank machine to make a bird "fly." This engineering activity introduces learners to automata, rotational motion, cranks and cams.

In this activity, learners explore the gait of horses by constructing flipbooks with British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's famous photographs.

In this activity, learners make mobiles to explore the concepts of balance, counterbalance, weight, and counterweight.

This is a tape and glue activity in which learners make binoculars that they can decorate and then use to go bird watching.

This simple construction activity teaches the importance of architectural structure. Learners build and test designs for a paper "doghouse" strong enough to hold the weight of a jumbo dog biscuit.

In this activity (on pages 41-47 of PDF), learners explore tesselating geometric patterns (repeated shapes, similar to the art of M.C. Escher).