TeachEngineering

TeachEngineering is a free digital library of K-12 engineering curriculum, developed and reviewed by engineering faculty and teachers at a consortium of universities and hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder. It contains well over 2,000 individual lessons, activities, curricular units, and maker challenges, all free to use and reproduce for educational purposes.

What distinguishes it from a general STEM activity site is that the material is genuinely about engineering as a discipline, not science experiments relabeled. Activities are built around the engineering design process: define a problem, research it, brainstorm solutions, build a prototype, test it, and iterate. A typical activity has students design and test something concrete, such as a water filter, a model bridge, a prosthetic limb, an earthquake-resistant structure, or a simple circuit, and then evaluate the result against criteria and constraints.

The browse interface is unusually good for planning. Results can be narrowed by grade band, subject area, curriculum type (lesson, activity, unit, maker challenge), and time required, and each item states its grade level, total time, cost of materials, group size, and required supplies before you open it. Every lesson also lists the standards it aligns to, including Next Generation Science Standards, which is helpful for families in states with reporting requirements.

Each activity page includes background for the instructor, vocabulary, step-by-step procedure, assessment questions, safety notes, and often troubleshooting advice for what commonly goes wrong. The instructor background sections are written for a non-engineer, which matters for a parent teaching outside their own field.

Materials are deliberately inexpensive and easy to source, and many activities scale down cleanly from a class of thirty to a single student working at home.