Great for Club Activities
Bat Wing Flyer: A Glider Challenge
By constructing model gliders from foam egg cartons, students are introduced to the parts of an airplane and learn how to balance for maximum flight performance.
Boomerangs!
Studying and making boomerangs teaches students about four forces that affect an airplane’s flight: thrust, gravity, drag and lift. Flying the boomerangs is motivating for students and teachers alike!
Crash Testing in the Lab
Students find crash testing CO2 cars really exciting--and in the course of the activity they learn a lot about the nature of force, mass, energy absorption, crumple zones, passenger containment and automotive safety.
Fire as Technology
A one-week activity gives students ample research and design practice and shows the life-or-death importance of technological creativity and persistence.
Ground Effect Vehicles
Students study hydrofoils, aerofoils and hovercrafts—vehicles designed to skim across bodies of water while transporting people and things. Project culminates in students building a tabletop hovercraft.
GPS Projects for the Technology Class
One of the hottest new crazes, geocaching--a high-tech treasure hunt--uses GPS technology. Used for a number of years in navigation and location finding, GPS has many different applications. Introduce it to your students with these engaging projects.
Katapultos: Teaching Basic Statistics with Ballistics
Heads up! This technology project increases math, science and technology correlations within the classroom while giving students a fun way to collect and apply measurement data.
Lighter-Than-Air-Vehicles: The Hot-Air Balloon
Students learn the basics of lighter-than-air flight, then construct a simple, small hot-air balloon from a plastic bag, thread, paper, and cardboard.
Model Glider
Move over Wright Brothers! This project gives students background information on the history of aviation that they use to then build and fly a small model glider.
Newspaper Structures
This activity helps middle schoolers learn the difference between a theorem and a law, how math and science explain geometric objects, how an object’s integrity affects its overall strength, how concepts from math and science apply to the technological design and problem-solving process. The parts of a polyhedron and Euler’s Law of regular polyhedra are also covered.
Pressurized Air/Water Rocketry—Build, Test and Learn!
The history of rocketry, the functioning of liquid-fuel and pressurized-air rockets and Newton’s laws are covered. Then, students and/or instructor build a launcher using wood and PVC tubing and launch bottle rockets.
The Solar Water Skimmer
Students attach a teacher-made solar panel and motor system to a Styrofoam boat of their own design.
Testing How Structure and Shape Affect Strength
Using only paper, tape and glue, students construct several structures and shapes to examine how different construction techniques affect an object’s strength. Then, using a teacher-built “smasher,” the objects are put to the test.
Toothpick Experiment: Investigating Construction Strength
Students experiment to determine the strength of various kinds of joints, then design and test the strength of bridges made from toothpicks.
Toy Truck Project
This activity uses inexpensive 2 x 4 lumber and is well suited for mass production.
Subject Codes:
- A — Applied Academics
- B — Building Trades / Construction
- C— Communication
- D — Drafting / Design / CAD
- E — Electricity / Electronics / Computer Technology
- G — Grading / Assessment
- M — Manufacturing
- PE — Power / Energy
- P — Problem Solving / Pre-Engineering
- S — Great for Substitutes
- T — Transportation
- W — Woodworking
Back to the Main Projects Page
