Engineering

The Milkweed in the Classroom lessons are designed to help students investigate a real-world phenomenon that is connected with students’ interests and experiences. In this unit, the monarch migration will act as the anchoring phenomenon and students will investigate the guiding question, “How has the monarch migration has changed over time and why?”

This EPA-funded, standards-aligned unit presents students with a real-world challenge of sustainably using limited natural resources to produce food, fiber, and fuel for a growing human population.

In this standards-aligned, 5-E lesson, students will learn about artificial lighting and its use in agricultural production, they will use engineering design principles and mathematics to design a model using plastic straws and tape and build a grow light stand out of PVC piping and connectors.

In this hands-on lesson, students will learn how precision agriculture uses geographic information systems (GIS) to help farmers and manufacturers make smart, efficient, and responsible decisions about how and when they plant, grow, irrigate, harvest, and transport crops.

Looking for a flexible way to practice noticing and wondering with your middle school or high school students? Check out this collection of graphs, maps, and charts! Each highlights a FEWSS (food, energy, water, and societal systems) topic and can be used as a focal point for students' sense-making discussions. You can use these as a bell-ringer, anchoring or investigative phenomenon, exit ticket, etc. Additional resources (notice and wonder t-chart template and class slide deck template) are provided to help you and your students get started!

The following lessons are provided to connect the Agpocalypse gameplay scenarios with broader learning objectives.

Farming is a balancing act. Are you ready to take on the challenge of maximizing production while using limited resources like land and water? Play AgPocalypse to test your skills!

The following resources provide more information about the phenomenon at the heart of the Prairie Protector digital game-woody encroachment in the Great Plains- and its social, economic, and environmental impacts.

Need a quick start guide before playing the AgPocalypse digital game? Watch the video tutorials below led by game developer, Chloe Lehnert, in which she introduces each of the scenarios (Irrigation, Grassfed Beef, and Life Cycle Analysis) and provides some useful tips.

Space Invaders is a standards-aligned, 5-E life science unit teaching about the ecology, evolution, and effects of invasive species as it applies to both natural and agricultural ecosystems.