STEAM Behind Motorsports

This set of six curricular activities that pull out examples of engineering as a part of STEAM in motorsports.  These activities involve elements of engineering including design and analysis, which are each an important part of all of the STEAM fields.  The activities make use of mathematics, science and language arts, as well as engineering habits of mind like communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.  The activities require hands-on work in groups of two or three students.  Larger groups will be ineffective. Engineering notebooks make a particularly helpful and fitting addition.  If students have little experience with racing, it might be helpful to refer to every day car driving or other real world applications as well.

The curriculum contains three packets:  

  1. An activity summary and planning guide (created in an Excel spreadsheet)
  2. An activity flow description (created as a PDF Booklet)
  3. A student activity sheet (created as  PDF Booklet)

The documents have been combined, so that you only need to open one at a time for your specific needs.  The student activity sheets have been designed to be duplicated for use by individual students or student teams as desired.  The planning spreadsheet has been populated with matching curricular standards; however, each activity can be matched to more standards, particularly local standards including language arts.

Each activity is meant to contain sufficient background information to be used in class as is.  The planning spreadsheet contains a comprehensive materials list that should be examined before the day of use so that they can be prepared.  Most of the materials should be easily found in an average school.  Having said that, teachers are encouraged to modify and add to the activities as ideas occur.

Each of the activities has scaffolding or differentiation that allows it to be used in both model and high school classrooms.  If the activity does not indicate any differentiation, it should be appropriate for any of the middle through high school grade levels.