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Racing with the Sun: Creating a Solar Car
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Learners use engineering design principles to construct and test a fully solar-powered car. Solar car kits usually include a photovoltaic cell and motor; some include a chassis as well.

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.

Blow-and-Go Parachute
Learners make a skydiver and parachute contraption and launch it. They see that the drag created by air resistance slows the descent of skydivers as they travel back to Earth.

Bend That Bar
Learners play the role of materials engineers as they test the flexibility of different materials.

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.

Engineering Ups and Downs
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In this activity, learners explore the engineering and principles behind working elevators.

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.

Sail Away
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In this activity, learners explore watercraft engineering and sailing.

Nano Waterproofing
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This lesson focuses on how nanotechnology has impacted the design and engineering of many everyday items from paint to fabrics.

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.

Copter Engineering
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In this activity, learners engineer a paper helicopter that spins to the ground when dropped.

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.

Filtration Investigation
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In this activity, learners explore how engineering has developed various means to remove impurities from water.

Spaghetti Bridge
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Play with your food while learning about engineering! Build a spaghetti bridge, then test its strength by piling on the marshmallows, raw spaghetti, raw linguine and coins.

Is That DNA in My Food?
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In this activity, learners extract DNA from wheat germ. Use this activity to introduce learners to DNA, biotechnology and genetic engineering.