Let the Games begin!

NSTA has teamed up once again with NBC Learn and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring you another exhilarating video series with connected lesson plans that will excite your students and add to your hands-on repertoire. Science of the Summer Olympics consists of 10 learning packages that will bring life to your STEM efforts.

The Science of… series has become a hit. Exciting live action coupled with explanations of the science behind it gives teachers a tool that piques student interest. Science of the Summer Olympics focuses on the link between science knowledge and engineering design with input from NSF engineers helping your students see how science is put to work. Then NSTA-developed lesson plans complete the packages. The series is available cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com and www.NSF.gov.

NSTA will also post portions of each package in this blog over the next several weeks, under the “NSF Videos and Lessons” category, and we hope you will try them out in the classroom. If you do, please leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Photo of giant Olympic rings by Government Olympic Communications.

Video: In “Missy Franklin & Fluid Dynamics,” Timothy Wei, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, applies concepts of fluid dynamics to “engineering” elite swimmers’ strokes, such as Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin’s, in much the same way as engineers design cars and airplanes to move through the fluid atmosphere.

Lesson plans

Two versions of the lesson plans help students build background and develop questions they can explore regarding the actions of objects in fluids. Both includes strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and strategies for a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.

SOTSO: Missy Franklin & Fluid Dynamics models how students might investigate factors that impact movement of objects through fluids.

SOTSO: Missy Franklin & Fluid Dynamics An Engineering Perspective models how students might apply what they learn in the video or other sources about fluids and motion to designing objects that move more efficiently in fluids.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans:

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