Instructional Materials - Unit 4.2 Energy Transfer: Electricity

Have you ever had a clock or other device stop working? What happened to make it stop working? In this unit, students make observations of a winding clock and a plug-in clock and consider the similarities and differences in what makes the two turn on and stay on. From there, the unit supports students in developing ideas about energy transfer by electrical currents as they go on school tours, take apart devices, and build simple circuits. Students also notice that some devices we use to tell time always know what time it is, and some have to be set by hand, which leads us to wonder how devices are designed to communicate and receive information. Students engage in an engineering design project about information and energy transfer and learn about how criteria and constraints shape designs. Unit investigations also help students understand that we generate electricity from renewable and nonrenewable resources. To end the unit, students apply all the ideas they have learned to design a Martian space rover that we power and can communicate with from Earth. The material is distributed in accordance with the CC BY-NC. See details at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/