Homemade Battery Engineering Design Challenge
https://serc.carleton.edu/nextgen_wa/resources/activities/238727.html

Students enjoy using inquiry and the engineering design process to answer questions and solve problems. For this engineering design challenge done as part of a high school chemistry lab, students get to design and test their own homemade batteries. They apply previously learned chemistry concepts, such as energy and chemical reactions, to define their own engineering problem and test solutions. They decide what inputs to change and by what amounts, define the constraints, and are responsible for problem solving as a team. Because this battery engineering challenge is student directed, it is also an excellent way to meet the needs of individual students, because it allows students to design experiments based on their interests and current level of understanding. It also gives students freedom to develop an experiment that interests them and one that will challenge their own misconceptions. Although this lesson was created for high school chemistry students, I have included rationale, Next Generation Science Standards-alignment, and an introduction to engineering, so that this could be used for middle level or secondary teacher education programs, as well as university-level introductory chemistry.

Suggested Citation

Rapelje, Isaac. 2020. Homemade Battery Engineering Design Challenge. NextGen-WA. Accessed at: https://serc.carleton.edu/nextgen_wa/resources/activities/238727.html