Whether it's the genetic code, an ancient language, or patterns of light in a distant galaxy, scientists often have to play the role of decoder. In this activity, learners create a code to send secret messages for other learners to decode. When learners set up a free account at Kinetic City, they can answer bonus questions at the end of the activity as a quick assessment. As a larger assessment, learners can complete the Bug Blaster game after they've completed several activities.

Paul Nurse describes his research that showed that humans share some genes with organisms as different from us as simple brewer's yeast. Footage from Secret of Life: "Immortal Thread." ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.

Through Internet research, patent research, standards and codes research, user interviews (if possible) and other techniques (idea web, reverse engineering), students further develop the context for their design challenge. In subsequent activities, the design teams use this body of knowledge about the problem to generate product design ideas. (Note: Conduct this activity in the context of a design project that students are working on, which could be a challenge determined by the teacher, brainstormed with the class, or the example project challenge provided [to design a prosthetic arm that can perform a mechanical function]. This activity is Step 2 in a series of six that guide students through the engineering design loop.)

Testing is critical to any design, whether the creation of new software or a bridge across a wide river. Despite risking the quality of the design, the testing stage is often hurried in order to get products to market. In this lesson, students focus on the testing phase of the software/systems design process. They start by exploring existing examples of program testing using the CodingBat website, which contains a series of problems and challenges that students solve using the Java programming language. Working in teams, students practice writing test cases for other groups' code, and then write test cases for a program before writing the program itself.

Try your hand at reading a segment of genetic code in this interactive feature from the NOVA "Cracking the Code of Life" Web site. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.

Students use a hurricane tracking map to measure the distance from a specific latitude and longitude location of the eye of a hurricane to a city. Then they use the map's scale factor to convert the distance to miles. They also apply the distance formula by creating an x-y coordinate plane on the map. Students are challenged to analyze what data might be used by computer science engineers to write code that generates hurricane tracking models. Then students analyze a MATLAB® computer code that uses the distance formula repetitively to generate a table of data that tracks a hurricane at specific time intervals. Students come to realize that using a computer program to generate the calculations (instead of by hand) is very advantageous for a dynamic situation like tracking storm movements. Their inspection of some MATLAB code helps them understand how it communicates what to do using mathematical formulas, logical instructions and repeated tasks. They also conclude that the example program is too simplistic to really be a useful tool; useful computer model tools must necessarily be much more complex.

In this activity, learners use mirrors to write secret messages to a friend. Use this activity to explore letters, optics, and/or symmetry.

In this outdoor, night-time activity, learners discover how to spot eye-shine (reflection of light from an animal's eyes) by using a flashlight to play a simulation game. Using the spotting technique they learn in the game, learners locate mysterious eyes, stalk the creatures, and observe the animal's behavior.

In this culminating activity of the unit, students bring together everything they've learned in order to write the code to solve the Grand Challenge. The code solution takes two images captured by robots and combines them to create an image that can be focused at different distances, similar to the way that humans can focus either near or far. They write in a derivative of C++ called QT; all code is listed in this activity.

Students analyze a cartoon of a Rube Goldberg machine and a Python programming language script to practice engineering analysis. In both cases, they study the examples to determine how the different systems operate and the function of each component. This exercise in juxtaposition enables students to see the parallels between a more traditional mechanical engineering design and computer programming. Students also gain practice in analyzing two very different systems to fully understand how they work, similar to how engineers analyze systems and determine how they function and how changes to the system might affect the system.

Working in small groups, students complete and run functioning Python codes. They begin by determining the missing commands in a sample piece of Python code that doubles all the elements of a given input and sums the resulting values. Then students modify more advanced Python code, which numerically computes the slope of a tangent line by finding the slopes of progressively closer secant lines; to this code they add explanatory comments to describe the function of each line of code. This requires students to understand the logic employed in the Python code. Finally, students make modifications to the code in order to find the slopes of tangents to a variety of functions.

In this activity, learners use a soda can to decode a secret message. Learners wrap scytale (pronounced ski-tally) code around a can and challenge friends to see if they can crack the codes. Learners can experiment with different cylinders to see how circumference plays a role in this activity.

In this activity, "write" a secret message in genetic code as beads on a string. Learners use an amino acid codon table to determine the DNA sequences that correspond to the one-letter amino acid abbreviations that make up their secret word(s). Learners also use start and stop codons in their sequences and follow a color key for the bases. Learners can trade strands with a friend to see if they can decode their secret message.