Students will examine the unique and diverse historical artifacts that people have designed to fulfill their everyday needs in extraordinary ways.

Students will analyze historic artifacts to help gain an understanding of how the past has impacted their lives.

Students build awareness of the strengths and weakness in their community. The lessons can be done as a series, individually, or in combinations. In the first part, students will evaluate how people interact with their environment in both positive and negative ways.

Working in groups for this lesson, students will research and design their own mythical creatures and will ultimately sculpt and paint representations of their creatures.

The Industrial Revolution changed the American way of life, both positively and negatively. This lesson challenges the students to investigate the historical system, identify the problems, choose a problem to focus on, investigate further, and generate possible solutions.

Students will learn more about Geography in relation to their school and its surroundings. Following a couple days of technical instruction (students learning about their school's location, how it is now and how it was in the past) with the teacher as facilitator, students will begin to work independently. Students will be asked to create a map of their school and its surrounding neighborhood.

Students will use skills in the core subject areas to design, construct, and maintain a school garden. Students will be able to write letters to businesses in the community to ask for supplies and materials. Through the activities the students will use math skills to construct the garden. Students will be able to observe and record the life cycle of plants.

Students will understand why monuments are built and design a new one to be placed on the Capitol Mall or in another important public place. Social studies, language arts, and drawing skills will be combined to create a short class presentation

Students will consider what it is like to be a new student in their school. They will interview students who transferred into the school last year to learn about their experiences as incoming students, and create materials or a program to help new students with their transition into the school.

After reading the novel The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, students will show comprehension of the plot and themes by creating a game based on the characters/events/themes of the book. They will also write instructions for game play, and a brief commercial that could be used to advertise their game.

Students will have a greater understanding about key American Revolution figures, American Revolution battles, maps, and cause/effect relationships. Students will achieve the curriculum standards and other expected outcomes by designing alternative war strategies, and explaining how those strategies might have altered history in comparison to what actually happened.

Students will investigate how transportation has evolved through the years and how it may continue to change in the future. Students will place a series of objects in chronological order and discuss what problem the designers addressed and solved with the invention of each of the objects. Students will also work in small groups to brainstorm ideas to identify and solve a current-day transportation problem.

In this lesson, students will design a new object (i.e. planet, comet, asteroid) for the solar system. By using the design process, students will show evidence of their knowledge about existing solar system objects, the objects' compositions and surface features, predictable motion, and their effects on each other. This series of activities would ideally serve as an assessment of a teacher's existing solar system unit but may stand alone as brief exploration into the solar system.

This lesson is designed to demonstrate the importance of correct punctuation in the real world. Students will be engaged in the design process as they use group work, individual thinking, and teacher prompting to discover just how important punctuation is to oral and written language. This lesson is an introduction to the design process. Students will learn how the process works for future design process activities.

Students will be introduced to the applied arts and will focus on the applied art of architecture. They will learn how architecture communicates messages about the people in a community who use a building. Students will also hone observational skills as they study the facade of their school and then create an observation drawing.

Students will design a remembrance box depicting how they would like to be remembered. The students will learn about the amount of thought and energy that has gone into designing memorials as well as the thinking that went into the designer's decision making and how those decisions were viewed by the public.

Students will visit the National Design Triennial: Why Design Now? exhibition and look at projects in the Mobility section, analyze the progression of inventions in the area of green or energy efficient transportation, and consider ways to solve this current-day transportation problem with energy efficient transportation options.