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. In Lessons 6 through 12, students investigate self-propelled vehicles. In Lesson 6, they are challenged to move their standard vehicle with the energy stored in a twisted rubber band. Students then freely investigate what happens when they attach the rubber band to the vehicle in various ways.