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Educators

Here at The Engineering Place, we have collected some of our favorite resource materials for teachers to use in their classrooms. We hope these materials are helpful to your students as they explore the vast field of engineering.

Graphic: wolves

Activity Lesson Plans

Engineering Activities

Feel free to use and modify these lesson plans as much as you like.* If you have any questions, concerns, or comments please send an email to coe-theengineeringplace@ncsu.edu.

*The materials created by The Engineering Place are free for use but must be appropriately credited to The Engineering Place and cannot be used for commercial purposes.

Other Helpful Sites

The Engineering Design Process

The Engineering Design Process
The Engineering Design Process

The Engineering Design Process that we use is adapted from the version designed by Boston Museum of Science’s Engineering is Elementary program. The Engineering Design Process is a consistent repetitive series of steps for developing or improving a product or system. Educators are encouraged to explain this 5-step process to students, as well as display it in their classrooms as a reference.

  • The Engineering Design Process Poster (print-ready PDF, 14.22 in. x 10.67 in.)
    Note to Firefox users: The pdf version of the poster may not display properly in Firefox’s built-in pdf viewer. If this happens, you can go to Firefox’s preferences, choose applications and switch to another viewer.
  • The Engineering Design Process Poster (higher resolution image, 11.0 in. x 8.25 in.) The image will open in another window. To download the image, follow your browser’s method of saving the image to your hard drive.
  • The Engineering Design Process Poster (low resolution image) The image will open in another window. To download the image, follow your browser’s method of saving the image to your hard drive.
  • View a text description of the poster.

Visit our programs page to learn more about how we work with schools and other groups!

Description of Graphic

The Engineering Design Process

  1. Ask
    • What is your design supposed to do?
    • How will you know if it is doing what you want? What could keep you from making it do that?
    • How will you test your design?
  2. Imagine
    • Apply knowledge and creativity to brainstorm ideas together.
    • Agree on one to try!
  3. Plan
    • Consider your materials and resources.
    • Sketch/draw the details.
    • Pitch your plan.
  4. Create
    • Follow the plan.
    • Test it out and compare your results to what you wanted or expected.
  5. Improve
    • Analyze your test results.
    • What change would make the biggest impact on meeting your goal?
  • The engineering design process is a series of steps that you repeat to develop or improve a product, process or system. You can start anywhere in the process, however, most engineers begin at ASK or IMPROVE.
  • Failure is always a part of the process … so is learning from failure!