Hacking STEM Lessons & Hands-On Activities
Build affordable inquiry and project-based activities to visualize data across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum. Middle school standards-based lesson plans written by teachers for teachers.
Lesson Plans, They’re Free!
Harnessing Electricity to Communicate
Students build a telegraph out of everyday objects to understand electrical energy and its role in communications. Then, they use a customized workbook to send and receive information in Morse code using their telegraph.
Make a Telegraph
Building Machines that Emulate Humans
Students build robotic models from cardboard and straws to understand the anatomy and biomechanics of the human hand. Then, they conduct trials visualizing data in Excel to generate new ideas for improving it’s performance.
Using Computational Thinking to Understand Earthquakes
Students build a seismograph to visualize earthquake data and explore modern engineering techniques used to mitigate earthquake damage. Then, they engage in an Excel big data activity to understand plate tectonics.
Make a Seismograph
Increasing Power Through Design
Students build a windmill and a wind turbine and measure its capacity to lift weight. Then they engage in a blade design challenge to achieve maximum power output. The results are visualized and analyzed in Excel.
Make a windmill
Analyzing Wind Speed with Anemometers
Students build anemometers from everyday objects and use them to measure wind speed. Then, they add a motor to their model to simulate wind speeds around the world using a customized Excel workbook.
Make an anemometerHarnessing Electricity to Communicate
Students build an LED signal lamp, a speaker made from a plastic cup and an electromagnet to learn foundational concepts of electricity. Next, they combine these elements to construct a telegraph to explore the role of electrical energy in global communications. Students then use a custom Excel workbook to send and receive information in Morse code and code/encode communication data.
Hacking STEM is made possible by a partnership between the Education Workshop, Hack for Good and the Microsoft Garage
What is the Education Workshop?
A small incubation team inside of Microsoft that focuses on developing next generation hardware, software, and services for K-12 education. Our goal is to support teachers building inquiry and project-based activities that embed computational and design thinking into existing middle school curriculum. We want to democratize STEM for learners and demonstrate how all schools can provide affordable opportunities to bring ‘making’ and 21st century technical skills to the classroom. Hacking STEM was originally prototyped by the Education Workshop as a Hack For Good during Microsoft’s 2016 //Oneweek Hackathon. Our ‘hacked’ version of Excel brings to life the fundamentals of science, opens the emerging world of IOT to the classroom and helps educators meet the NGSS and ISTE standards for data science.
Need help? Have questions?
@hacking_STEM
Also brought to you by
Hack for Good
Hack for Good is the community of employees who want to use their technical and business hacking skills to help solve the world's greatest societal problems. The goal is to foster a community that will collaborate, create and build solutions that will empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Microsoft philanthropies
The Microsoft Garage
The Microsoft Garage "Ship Channel" is Microsoft's official outlet for experimental projects from small teams across the company to test a hypothesis, receive early customer feedback, and determine product market fit. The Garage provides expert guidance and a lightweight release process to help teams get their experiments out quickly.
Microsoft Garage
