This month's lesson, Red Light, Green Light, and associated activities provide the opportunity for students to explore the importance of friction to automotive engineers designing safe cars. Building upon their understanding of forces and Newton's laws of motion, students learn about the force of friction, specifically with respect to cars. They explore the friction between tires and the road to learn how it affects the movement of cars while driving.

In the associated activity, How Far, students explore how different textures provide varying amounts of friction to objects moving across them to learn how friction affects motion. They build a tool to measure the amount of friction between a note card and various surfaces by measuring the distance that a rubber band stretches. They experiment with a range of materials to determine which provides the least/most friction. If you have spring scales available, Sliding and Stuttering provides another option for a similar activity.

This lesson and activity is brought to you by the new Engineering Pathway, a part of the National Science Digital Library. The portal provides high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology and engineering technology — for use by K-12 and university educators. The Engineering Pathway brings together quality engineering education materials from all over the internet allowing teachers to search all of these documents in a single location. The lesson and activity are from the TeachEngineering Digital Library for K-12 engineering curricula.