Engineering Education Innovative Uses

Use Logger Pro’s newly enhanced ability to control a Vernier Digital Control Unit (DCU) to challenge your students to create an alarm system that gives a warning when someone enters an area. The ability to turn on or off an electrical device in response to inputs from a digital sensor, an analog sensor, or time,…

Subjects: Engineering Education

Lots of attention has recently been given to the issue of brain injuries to young people in sports activities. This has led to quite a few science projects looking into the effectiveness of helmets. Kevin Bruff of Portsmouth, RI, has worked with students to do a very nice study of inflatable helmets used for lacrosse…

Subjects: Engineering Education, Physics

Steve Decker, an instructor of electronics at Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, used the book to acquaint his students with instrumentation control. After completing exercises in the lab book, Decker’s students created independently-designed projects to demonstrate what they had learned. In a recent class, for example, two students created an electric piano. The team coupled…

Subjects: Engineering Education

In her article, “Cooking with Quadratics,” published in the November 2010 issue of Mathematics Teacher, Luajean Bryan examines the math behind solar cookers. Bryan’s students at Walker Valley High School in Cleveland, TN, designed solar cookers and analyzed their properties using Vernier sensors. The cookers are three-dimensional parabolic dishes designed through the understanding of quadratic…

Subjects: Engineering Education, Physics

The FIRST LEGO® League Team from Reston, VA recently took part in the High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza (HALE) balloon launch. Their payload included a LEGO NXT Robotics System with a Vernier NXT Adapter and two Vernier sensors—a UVB Sensor and a Surface Temperature Sensor. UV pinwheel filter (sunglass lens, cotton shirt, denim, and no filter)…

Subjects: Engineering Education