2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Energy and energy transformations are essential for engineers to understand as they utilize their conceptual understandings to minimize/maximize transformations in designed systems. This lesson is a mix of demonstrations and inquiry experiences intended to guide students through concepts of energy transformations (e.g., kinetic, elastic) and engineering concepts of snap-through transitions in both the natural and engineered world. Students will develop foundational understandings of energy conservation with a simple ball bouncing demonstration and build to more complex concepts of spring/elastic energy using the classic 90’s rubber popper toys to investigate the energy transformations in the system. Depending on the age of the students, the lesson will extend to discuss the snap-through transition happening with the popper toy and connect this idea to real-world examples (e.g., venus flytrap). From there, students will develop experiments to investigate how they can manipulate the height of the popper through various energy transformations (e.g., collisions, heat). Using popper toys, students will conduct an investigation to determine the approximate height a popper jumps, eventually incorporating additional variables, such as popper size, time held inverted, surface popped from. For each new investigation, students will document data and observations and
report on the relationships found as related to energy transformations. As an extension, high school students might calculate the relative value of a "spring constant" of the popper toy using their understanding of potential energy, kinetic energy, and springs. Goals for students include critical thinking, communication (both written and oral), drawings models, as well as a deep understanding of energy and energy transformations.