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Design Your Own Rube Goldberg Machine
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Engineer and cartoonist Rube Goldberg is famous for his crazy machines that accomplish everyday tasks in overly complicated ways.

Oil Spill Cleanup
This hands-on experiment will provide learners with an understanding of the issues that surround environmental cleanup.

Breaking Beams
Learners investigate stress and strain by designing, building, and testing beams made from polymer clay.

Trash Talkin'
In this activity, learners collect, categorize, weigh and analyze classroom trash and discuss ways that engineers have helped to reduce solid waste.

Hot Cans and Cold Cans
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Learners apply their knowledge of heat transfer to design two cans - one that will retain heat and one that will cool down quickly.

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

Spaghetti Bridge
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Learners explore the field of civil engineering by making a bridge using spaghetti as their primary building material.

Gumdrop Dome
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In this activity (located on pages 23-24 of the PDF), learners are introduced to structural engineering and encouraged to practice goal-oriented building.

Vectoring: Steering a Plane
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In this two part activity, learners work in pairs or individually to discover how vectoring the thrust from a jet engine affects movement of an airplane.

Designing a Wall
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In this engineering activity (page 5 of PDF), young learners investigate how materials and design contribute to the strength of a structure, particularly walls.

Chain Reaction II
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In this hands-on activity, learners use an assortment of (mainly household) items to complete Rube Goldberg-type challenges.

For Your Eyes Only
Learners build particulate matter collectors--devices that collect samples of visible particulates present in polluted air.

What Gives?
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In this activity, learners design, build and test a model suspension bridge for sturdiness and strength.

Straws and Pins
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In this activity, learners build bridges and cantilevers in a series of "building out" challenges with straws and pins.

Roller Coasters
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In this design challenge, learners will create their own roller coaster using household objects for the track and a marble or small ball as their cart.

Build a Bridge
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In this activity, learners use design thinking to design and build their own bridge out of household materials including adhesives and/or connectors.

Zipline
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In this design activity, learners create a vehicle that can transport a load, like a favorite toy or as a recycled object, from the top of a zipline to the bottom using only gravity.

Achieving Orbit
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In this Engineering Design Challenge activity, learners will use balloons to investigate how a multi-stage rocket, like that used in the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, can propel a sat

Sugar Crystal Challenge
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This lesson focuses on surface area and how the shape of sugar crystals may differ as they are grown from sugars of different coarseness.

Landing the Rover
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In this team design challenge (page 19-24 of PDF), learners "land" a model Lunar Rover in a model Landing Pod (both previously built in activities #3 and #4 in PDF).