Video: Science Friday- The Big Sort
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Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
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In this lesson plan, your students will build their own recycling sorting machines that use various methods, like magnets or puffs of air, to separate shreds of paper from paper clips. This lesson is inspired by the real-world engineering challenge of separating various materials, like paper, plastic, and metals, that get combined in single-stream recycling programs.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
- MS-PS2-3. Ask questions about data to determine the factors that affect the strength of electric and magnetic forces.
- MS-PS2-5. Conduct an investigation and evaluate the experimental design to provide evidence that fields exist between objects exerting forces on each other even though the objects are not in contact.
- MS-ETS1-2. Evaluate competing design solutions using a systematic process to determine how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.






