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NC Teachers breathe new life into lessons through STEMwork

STEM Education

Seismograph for earthquake detection or lie detector is drawing graph. 3D rendered illustration. By vchalup

Dec 16, 2025

Seismic Smackdown

In this Project-Based Learning (PBL) unit, students will learn about plate tectonics and how the Earth’s plates move and interact. Students will also learn about the causes of earthquakes. Duration Standards Driving Question As a class, students will generate their own Driving Question using the Nat Geo Question Formulation Technique. Example: How can we create an…
team members helping each other.

Dec 15, 2025

Collaboration: Developing Skills for the Classroom and Beyond

This lesson provides a tabletop tool for teaching student collaboration in the classroom. By tapping into students’ existing knowledge about teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and other collaborative skills, you can help them make relevant connections to science content. Teaching student collaboration in the classroom engages them more actively in the learning process and allows you to address…
Male common fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster) - about 2mm long - sitting on a blade of grass with green foliage background

Dec 15, 2025

Life Cycles of Drosophila

nquiry-based unit to help 7th-grade students understand the life cycles of drosophila and become comfortable with the science inquiry. Students will become comfortable using stereoscopes and observing patterns of different or recurring phenotypes in Drosophila. They will also practice putting Drosophila in chill comas and flipping them into new containers. In these lessons, students work together to create…
A student completes a marshmallow STEM challenge

Dec 15, 2025

The Marshmallow Challenge (STEM Education)

The Marshmallow Challenge is an engineering challenge that can be used in any content area or situation. In this challenge, students will work in groups of four to collaborate and build the tallest free-standing tower out of 30 strands of uncooked spaghetti, a meter of string, arm’s length of tape, and a marshmallow that must…
Butterfly on a flower

Dec 15, 2025

NC Teachers breathe new life into lessons through STEMwork

Hendersonville Middle School teacher Jill Jackson finds math problems in unexpected places. Consider the southern migration of the Monarch butterfly. Jackson turned their annual journey across North America into a seventh-grade math lesson about integers. Using project-based learning (PBL), Jackson’s students traced the latitude and longitude coordinates of Monarch butterflies as they migrated to Mexico.…