Grade 5 Science: Engineering, Technology, and Sustainability
Free Grade 5 Science unit on Engineering, Technology, and Sustainability: 10 lessons in order. Includes practice questions and answer keys.
10 lessons in this unit
The engineering design process
Learn the steps engineers follow, ask, imagine, plan, create, test and improve, and use them to solve a small classroom problem.
Lesson 2Identifying problems
Learn to define a problem clearly, name who it affects, and write criteria for success and constraints such as cost, time and materials.
Lesson 3Researching solutions
Learn to research how others solved similar problems, gather information from books, people and observation, compare sources and record findings.
Lesson 4Designing prototypes
Learn to generate several ideas, sketch labelled designs, choose the best against criteria using a decision table, and plan a prototype.
Lesson 5Selecting materials
Learn to choose materials by their properties such as strength, flexibility, waterproofing, weight and cost, and test them fairly to decide.
Lesson 6Building prototypes
Learn to follow a build plan, measure and cut accurately, join materials safely, keep a build log and make small changes when problems appear.
Lesson 7Testing designs
Learn to test a prototype against the criteria with a fair test, take repeated measurements, record results in a table and decide what the data show.
Lesson 8Improving solutions
Learn to analyse test results, find the weakest point, make one change at a time, retest and judge whether the new version is better.
Lesson 9Sustainable technology
Learn what makes technology sustainable, reduce, reuse, recycle, renewable energy and efficient design, and evaluate the environmental impact of a product.
Lesson 10Engineering project
Bring together the whole engineering design process to solve a real school problem, from defining it to a tested, improved, sustainable prototype, and present the results.