Lesson 1 is designed to reveal to the students, and those working with them, what they already know and what questions they have about motion and design. After becoming familiar with a building set, students design and construct a simple vehicle. In Lesson 2, students make a drawing to record the vehicle they designed and built in Lesson 1 and then build a standard vehicle from a technical drawing. Students' work in Lessons 1 and 2 serves as a pre-unit assessment that is matched to corresponding assessment activities at the end of the unit. In Lesson 3, students use the standard vehicle they built in Lesson 2 to investigate how a vehicle moves when acted on by various forces.
Students create a system of falling weights to pull the vehicle.
By observing how the vehicle moves when a weighted string pulls it, they can investigate how a force can change a vehicle's motion. In Lesson 4, students modify the vehicle so that it can carry a load and then investigate how different loads affect the way the vehicle responds to a force. Students measure the time it takes the vehicle to move a distance and plot the results. These two lessons set the stage for a design challenge in Lesson 5, an embedded assessment in which students must build a vehicle that moves a specified distance in a specified time. Students present their results to the class and discuss the strategies they used to meet the challenge.