tells the story of Manassa Pope, the first black man to receive a medical license in North Carolina (1886). After practicing medicine and helping establish a drug store and insurance company in Charlotte, Pope moved his family to Raleigh. There he continued his medical practice, built an elegant house (equipped with the latest technologies) located in the best place allowed for a black family in a segregated city. He later ran for mayor.

is a curriculum-oriented guide to the life of the famous nurse. The site uses photographs, floor plans, and the like about her home in Glen Echo, Maryland as a focal point but gives readings and suggested school assignments about her career.

We design and create objects to make our lives easier and more comfortable. The houses in which we live are an excellent example of this. Depending on your local climate, the features of your house will be different to satisfy your particular needs; protection from hot, cold, windy, and/or rainy weather. Students should be aware of the different types of roofs found on various houses in different environments throughout the world. This can be done with books and photos. Models of the houses will be constructed and tested against various climate elements.

Students explore the many different ways that engineers provide natural lighting to interior spaces. They analyze various methods of daylighting by constructing model houses from foam core board and simulating the sun with a desk lamp. Teams design a daylighting system for their model houses based on their observations and calculations of the optimal use of available sunlight to their structure.

examines the life of Stephen Decatur, a naval hero who died as a result of a duel in 1820, and considers the role the house he built played in the political and social scene of the nation's capital up to the 20th century.

This collection of images follows the process of building a house from cutting the trees and making the bricks to finishing construction.

We all know that it takes energy to provide us with the basics of shelter: heating, cooling, lighting, electricity, sanitation and cooking. To create energy-efficient housing that is practical for people to use every day requires combining many smaller systems that each perform a function well, and making smart decisions about the sources of power we use. Through four lessons on the topics of heat transfer, circuits, daylighting and electricity from renewable energy sources, students learn about the science, math and engineering that go into designing energy-efficient components of smart housing that is environmentally friendly. Through numerous design/build/analyze activities, students create a solar water heater, swamp cooler, thermostat, model house, model greenhouse, and wind and water turbine prototypes. Students should concurrently be taking Algebra 1 in order to complete the worksheet calculations.

In this video segment from PEEP and the Big Wide World, children experiment with cardboard and build a house for their stuffed animals.

examines the life and times of the Reverend Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), a preacher, author, and educator in New England. At the age of 20, Bellamy became the minister in Bethlehem, Connecticut. He and other ministers, spent most of 1741-1742 riding about New England preaching sermons meant to bring sinners back to the fold of the church. The movement, known as the Great Awakening, appealed particularly to working class people and spread throughout the northern and central colonies.

Through an introduction to the design of lighting systems and the electromagnetic spectrum, students learn about the concept of daylighting as well as two types of light bulbs (lamps) often used in energy-efficient lighting design.

You practice your speaking skills in connection with describing a house and the plural forms of nouns.

is a curriculum-oriented guide to a home in Waterloo, New York in which several early abolitionists, women's rights advocates, and social reformers lived. The site uses photos and drawings of the house as a beginning point to lead into readings about the First Woman's Rights Convention in nearby Seneca Falls in 1848.

Students learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the greenhouse effect. They construct their own miniature greenhouses and explore how their designs take advantage of heat transfer processes to create controlled environments. They record and graph measurements, comparing the greenhouse indoor and outdoor temperatures over time. Students are also introduced to global issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and their relationship to global warming.

Students learn and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of renewable and non-renewable energy sources. They also learn about our nation's electric power grid and what it means for a residential home to be "off the grid."

focuses on one of the most successful whaling captains in New England. Edward Penniman was 11 in 1842 when he signed on as cook on a schooner. Years later, as a captain, he set sail from New Bedford seven times to hunt whales. The trips generally took several years each. Letters indicate he did not like life at sea, but the money allowed him to afford a large ornate house, which is featured at this site, along with a brief a history of whaling in America.

Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Students work through the engineering design process to build the turbines, analyze the performance of their turbines and make calculations to determine the most suitable locations to build dams.

Students learn how engineers harness the energy of the wind to produce power by following the engineering design process as they prototype two types of wind turbines and test to see which works best. Students also learn how engineers decide where to place a wind turbine, and the advantages and disadvantages to using wind power compared to other non-renewable energy sources.

Pieces together the story of the James Robinson family from artifacts found in archaeological excavations around the house where they lived for nearly a century. An African American born free in 1799, Robinson worked in a Virginia tavern earning nearly $500 to purchase 170 acres of land near Bull Run. There he built a log cabin, and his family turned the land into a prosperous farm, making him one of the wealthiest African Americans in the Manassas area in the mid-19th century.

Students use a table-top-sized tsunami generator to observe the formation and devastation of a tsunami. They see how a tsunami moves across the ocean and what happens when it reaches the continental shelf. Students make villages of model houses and buildings to test how different material types are impacted by the huge waves. They further discuss how engineers design buildings to survive tsunamis. Much of this activity setup is the same as for the Mini-Landscape activity in Lesson 4 of the Natural Disasters unit.