Technology, Engineering and Design Project Ideas

I teach and am the sophomore class advisor. I thought I would greet the students this year with a treat. I found a bag of tootsie pops with enough for all 73 of my sophomores. So I whipped up these tiny capes on Word, cut them out and punched a hole in the circle part to go around the neck of the tootsie pop, and tied a ribbon around the neck to keep the cape on. I will either hand them out at the door or place on at each seat in my room. I actually fit two of these batches on a sheet of colored paper. After you cut them out and punch the holes, make a crease at the neck so the cap parallels the stick of the tootsie pop or whatever taffy you can find. If you can go to NJTEEA FB and post what you do for treats if anything. I use to put some gummi worms in a bag and make a label that said, "Early Bird Treats" and give a bag to the first person that walked in the classroom. Students would run to class after that!

September 21st is international Day of Peace. Check out this site for more details. I thought I could turn this event into an activity usuing the pinwheels as one of the projects for the design principles. I will plan to have the students display their pinwheels down a main outdoor pathway on our campus on September 21st. Please join me and share images of your student work wherever you can to promote peace.

Every once in a while, I will see a new chocolate candy flavor or candy bar combination and think to myself, "Wow, that took them long enough to come up with that one or put that one out to the public." This year I want to challenge my students to design their own new charbolate bar combo like a Chunky or Snickers or even a new M&M flavor. For years I had my freshmen do marine themed chocolate bars. They design the shape and packaging. The 3.5 ounce chocolate limit forced the student to think about an individual bar design. Of course I would get starfish and anchors, but one year, I got one designed to be 1st Sgt. Nelson, one of our Naval Science instructors at the time because he was a marine! Situation The “Free Willy Wonka” chocolate manufacturer is looking for a new line of marine themed  solid or mixed ingredient   3.5 ounce chocolate bars to market along the coast (of a Spanish speaking country). Design Brief Design, develop and produce a 3.5-ounce s...

The Epilog Laser Cutter is a fascinating machine. This year I will be having my students create wooden trivet designs to cut out on the laser. I have 70ish students each year that all need an experience on the equipment. I think this will be a nice project with a take home item to share with the family. I plan to use 1/4" luan plywood for these laser cut items. I am anxious to see what the students design. This project can be used to reinforce any of the design principles, but students tend to forget what positive and negative space means, until I remind them about the cutouts in a pumpkin.

OK, back to photography and have the students really commit these art and graphic temrs to memory. For one of my SGO's (Student Growth Objectives) I wanted to come up with a better way for students to learn the design elements and princles, especially the different types of each; mechanical, geometric, regular, irregular. etc. Enough of the students would not get these terms sorted out in their minds. So, I added this set of worksheets to get them to think about the terms, practice them, organize them and label them. The more they played with the information, the more they would learn the terms. This proved to be a very successful SGO. Most students love to take photos. Sometimes I tell them I want office worthy photos, not their Lego man on their desk at home. I tell them that they need to put some inspiring quote beneath the image to use as office artwork. This eliminates the junky photos that are taken in the wee hours of the morning when they realize the due date is tomorrow!...

I have found that students struggle with the concept of Space as they constantly want to put white space between their objects. So I often use the word depth instead. This worksheet helps them practice the different ways of creating space. Now, try to get your students to add shading detail to their work to make their images pop off of the page to provide depth or space.  Now try to get them to create some realistic looking objects using color, texture and space. Now get them to put their knowledge to work in a fun activity making a montague using various elements from other sources. See some examples of the previous worksheets and a montague here .

These worksheets address Texture and force students to look around them for texture in their world. Texture is all around us and so often gets overlooked. often students will tell me that some objects have no texture, when in fact "smooth" is a texture and that is what they really should give as an answer.  Perhaps a list of texture words would be of some help to students new to identifying and describing surfaces. For instance, you would not say that a stone is stoney. Some students fall into the trap of naming the object rather than the texture. How would you describe etching on a glass bottle or mirror?  Textures: Bumpy, Smooth, Rough, Gritty, Slick, Silky, Soft, Prickly, Fuzzy, Hard, Woven, Rigid, Jagged, Chalky, Pasty, Bristly, etc. Some textures need further explanation like woven. A woven texture could be fine or coarse.  Some textures can be summed up using another word like the stiff and prickly hairs on a pig can be described as bristly. Depending on ...

Each of us sees our own version of the same colors and in some cases, some don't see the color at all. These worksheets allow the student to understand the nature of color and start to play with the effects of color when used onw their own or paired with other colors. The last worksheet encourages studetns to consider whay companies use the colors that they do and why nature uses color to attract or repel.

Most of us live in rectagular prisms because they are cheaper to build and an irregular shapeds structure. If you were to watch the movements of a family from an aerial view you would see that they do not move in x-y paths throught their spaces during their daily routines. If we were to form walls around the spaces that enveloped their movements, they would live in amoeba shaped structures which would be quite costly to build. However, in design, allowing form to follow function is the way to go reach the best design solution. This worksheet pushes students to think about current designed items and whay they take on the 3D form that they do.