Adventure Engineering Curricula

Each Adventure Engineering unit offers approximately two weeks (500 classtime minutes) of inquiry-based, hands-on activities designed to engage students and scaffold learning of meaningful science and math concepts. The units are strongly aligned with national science and math standards, and are motivated by adventure themes that require student teams to engineer solutions to important and captivating problems.

Each Adventure Engineering unit contains lost of hands-on activities, e.g., rock testing, volcano building, biosphere building, mapping. Therefore, each unit requires a classroom kit.

Each unit has a detailed teacher's guide, student worksheets, maps, handouts, and literacy components. You can find samples of these elements for each unit below. If you would like us to email you the complete set of documents including a materials list, please submit a request here. You can build the kit yourself - it just takes time!

Given the time it takes to chase down and purchase the required materials and print out handouts (many are in color, some are 11x17), we are also offering classroom kits for the cost it takes to make them. Just contact us if you're interested in purchasing a classroom kit.

Please note that this material is copyrighted. So all you curriculum developers out there looking for great stuff to pilfer, hands off!

We truly hope you enjoy the Adventure Engineering units, and we welcome all feedback!

Available Units

Asteroid Impact

6th-8th Earth Science

Student teams are informed that an asteroid will impact earth. They must design the location and size of underground caverns to save the people of the state of Alabraska from an uninhabitable earth for one year.

Volcano Alert

6th-8th Earth Science

Motivated by the impending eruption of Mt. Gunnarupt, student teams are tasked with evaluating the potential erruption, designing an early warning system and an evacuation plan for the thousands of people who live near Mt. Gunnarupt.

Lost in the Amazon

4th and 5th Math/Science

A team of EnviroTech engineers (the students) returning from a conference in Brazil crash in the middle of the rainforest, near the city of Manaus. They must navigate, explore, and survive the Amazon rainforest to reach Manaus as quickly and safely as possible.

Saving the Biosphere

5th-9th Physical/Life Science

Biosphere 3, built on Mars as a self-sustaining ecosystem to support human, animal, and plant life, is failing. Driven by the need to fix the biosphere, student engineering teams will build a model replica of the biosphere, study it as it fails, and then design ways to fix the model and the biosphere.