Eleventh Grade Lesson Plans (65 results)

Building on an introduction to statics, dynamics free-body diagrams, combustion and thermodynamics provided by the associated lesson, students design, construct and test their own rocket engines using sugar and potassium nitrate—an opportunity to apply their knowledge of stoichiometry. This activity helps students understand that the energy required to launch a rocket comes from the chemical energy stored in the rocket fuel. The performance of each engine is tested… Read more

Students investigate passive solar building design with a focus solely on heating. They learn how insulation, window placement, thermal mass, surface colors, and site orientation play important roles in passive solar heating. They use this information to design and build their own model houses, and test them for thermal gains and losses during a simulated day and night. Teams compare designs and make suggestions for improvements.Engineering Connection Passive solar heating… Read more

Students learn how astronomers use the transit method to detect exoplanets, by measuring how the brightness of a star changes over time. Animations illustrate how light curves vary for systems with single versus multiple planets, and for planets of different sizes. Students interpret and analyze light curve data from actual exoplanet discoveries, and make connections to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Read more

This lesson plan enables students to describe a transit and the conditions when a transit may be seen, describe how a planet’s size and distance from its star affects the behavior of transits, and interpret graphs of brightness vs time to deduce information about planet-star systems. Read more

The star TRAPPIST-1 has seven earth-sized rocky planets. Students calculate planet densities, travel time to reach TRAPPIST-1, and how much they would weigh on each planet. Read more