An 8th-grade class builds model water wheels and develops some conceptual understanding about forces, simple machines, and mechanical advantage. One segment shows students carrying out sense making using their own analogies. Each video is between 22 and 30 minutes long. All the teachers involved with this video project were middle school teachers. This series shows both classroom footage as well as discussions among the same teachers around issues of changing their style of teaching.
Some segments focus on individual teachers.
The areas of investigation are structures, density, plant growth, heat, and tides. Parts of these videos show segments during which there is no voice over and the viewer can observe students interacting with each other for extended periods. Each video is 45 minutes long . Dorcas Gonzalez-Lantz, 6th Grade Investigation about change of state by observing the change from ice to steam. Kathy Brown, 7th grade Study of human circulatory system involving a case study and the use of a special resource-a local lab at a hospital.