• Students review how to use the practices of science and engineering, focusing on the metric system, tools of measurement types of observation, and the difference between observation and inference.

Students begin with the common experience of dropping a cell phone and subsequently the relief of picking up an undamaged phone or the frustration of the shattered screen. Students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”

Student will:

• investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision

• use free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions

• apply their learning about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision

• apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem

In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance based on the phenomenon of a truck playing loud music in a parking lot shaking the windows of a building across the parking lot .

Students will: 

• revisit the idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds

• figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made

• investigate how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make

• conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through

• use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level

This unit allows students to investigate the cause of a speaker’s vibration when playing music, in addition to the effect, relating it to non-contact forces..

Students will:

• dissect speakers to explore the inner workings,

• engineer homemade cup speakers to manipulate the parts of the speaker

• identify that most speakers have the same parts–a magnet, a coil of wire, and a membrane and investigate each of these parts to figure out how they work together as an electromagnet in the speaker system

• manipulate the components (e.g. changing the strength of the magnet, number of coils, direction of current) to see how this technology can be modified and applied to a variety of contexts, like MagLev trains, junkyard magnets, and electric motors

Driven by the phenomenon of Manhattanhenge, students draw from their own experiences and cultures, and from indigenous astronomies from around the world, to explore how patterns in the sky set the rhythms for their lives, their communities, and all life on Earth.

Students will:

• develop models for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Sun-Moon systems that explain seasons, eclipses, and lunar phases

• investigate a series of related phenomena motivated by their questions and ideas for investigations

• explore the remaining questions on their Driving Question Board, related to planets and other objects farther out in space (beyond the stars they can see with the unaided eye) 

This unit on genetics and environment starts out with an exploration of differing musculature in cattle and the possible causes of these differences in musculature. 

Students will: 

• use videos, photos, data sets, and readings to investigate what causes an animal to get extra-big muscles 

• figure out how muscles typically develop as a result of environmental factors such as exercise and diet

• work with cattle pedigrees, including data about chromosomes and proteins, to figure out genetic factors that influence the heavily muscled phenotype and explore selective breeding in cattle

• explain other trait variations they’ve seen

• investigate plant reproduction, including selective breeding and asexual reproduction (in plants and other organisms) 

• investigate other examples of traits that are influenced by genetic and environmental factors

• figure out how environmental and genetic factors together play a role in the differences we see among living things

• This will be my eighth year teaching in Burlington, MA at Marshall Simonds Middle School. In prior years, I worked with students in Bedford at an elementary level.  I am a career changer and have worked previously as a civil engineer in the environmental field. I love science!