Science 2: Testing Materials and Designs

In this episode, Sabrina talks about how we can all be better engineers by understanding what problems we want or need to solve.

In our last episode, Sabrina talked about how engineers define the problems they need to solve. But how do you know when you've actually solved a problem? What do you expect to happen that would equal success?

It's time to design some trials. In order to do that, we need to design trials to find failure points and see how things are going to work in the real world (with gravity, wind, and human error all factored in).

So, there might not be just one solution to a problem. I know that may sound weird, but it's true. So, how do you come up with multiple solutions?

We all know that failure is bad... but is it? Actually, engineers need things to fail so they can understand how to make things better. In this episode, Sabrina chats to us about failure points and how they can help us find better solutions to problems.

This time we need to figure out what to do if you don't have all the things you'd like to have to perform your tests. How do you isolate a variable across multiple tests?

We've talked about variables and solving problems. But how do we keep working on a problem if the first solution doesn't fix it? In this episode, Sabrina shows us how to use Trials to figure out what the problems are with our solutions.

Teacher resources related to materials and design.

A lesson plan for teaching students how to test materials. Students will help plan and conduct different tests on the materials.