Engineering activities don’t require expensive classroom equipment. All you need are a few common items such as paper, scissors, tape, and cardboard. Add a few milk or juice cartons, some coins, and Harry Roman’s latest book, and you have all the ingredients needed to get your students thinking like engineers.

Engineering Activities with Paper and Cardboard includes 10 teacher-tested, multipart activities that demonstrate essential skills every engineer must possess: listening to and understanding specifications, planning, recognizing that variations in materials and design affect the integrity of a structure, testing a model, and graphing and drawing conclusions from test data. In addition, 23 classroom exercises challenge students to explore the properties and origins of building materials.