Although there is a great deal of historical information about aerodynamics that could be discussed here, we purposely narrowed the stream of resources to those that encourage students to experiment with technological design and function.
This activity is designed to help middle school students understand that planets travel in nearly circular orbits around the sun, and that planetary motion obeys laws defined by Kepler and Newton. Students will explore interactive web sites demonstrating orbital motion and complete a series of modeling activities.
In this step-by-step tutorial, students will learn to use computer image processing techniques to measure the size of Earth's polar ice caps and analyze various phenomena visible on planetary images. These skills can be used to scale and analyze any image of our Sun, the planets, or any other electronic image found on the Internet.
This electronic publication offers middle school teachers select resources that they can use when teaching about the prototype development stage of the design process. Engineers engage in the design process when they are developing new products.
In this middle-school level activity, students work as NASA scientists to make repeated observations of our Sun and the planets to determine their rotation rates. First, students create a playground model of rotation and create representative diagrams. Students then observe NASA images of sunspots to determine the rotation rate of our Sun. In the last phase, students download NASA movies from the Internet and measure rotation rates for objects in the solar system.
