Teachers' Lesson Plans

Teachers, do you dream of a learning resource that will grab your students’ attention and engage them as thoroughly as the video games they play at home and on their mobile phones? Are you looking for a classroom resource that will motivate your students to apply science and math concepts to real world problems? Would you like to spark your students interest in pursuing a career in Science or Engineering?

Enter the world of PowerUp, a free, online, multiplayer game that allows students to experience the excitement and the diversity of modern engineering!

Playing the game, students work together in teams to investigate the rich, 3D game environment and learn about the environmental disasters that threaten the game world and its inhabitants.

Players meet Expert Engineer characters and experience the great diversity of the field. Conversations with these experts and engaging interactive activities allow players to explore ways engineers design and build systems to harness renewable energy sources as alternatives to burning fossil fuels.

Players take on the role of Engineers, working together designing and building energy solutions to save the world.

The Teacher's Guide is designed to be a classroom companion to PowerUp, providing background information for teachers and lesson plans that give students opportunities for more in-depth exploration of science and engineering concepts addressed in gameplay.

Each of these lessons is designed to be flexible and scalable. Feel free to use the lessons and activities as raw materials and break them up, combine parts, skip parts and extend lessons with your own content. Extension activities and resources for more information are suggested. This flexibility will allow you to best adapt the lessons to your students’ needs.

The two lessons based on the Orientation Center (Lessons 1 and 2) review concepts that are integral to the game’s back story and provide students an insight into the diversity of the Engineering field.

In the three lessons based on the game’s missions (Lessons 3, 4, and 5) students will take on the role of engineers and work in groups to solve a challenge. Students will design, prototype, test and revise their solution using a low-cost collection of recycled school and household materials. A sample assessment rubric and other resources for facilitating effective Project Based Learning are included in this Teachers Guide.

Finally, working on the research project (Lesson 6) students have the opportunity to investigate how issues that are critical in the game world impact their own communities. Research projects will also provide a context for students to meet local Engineers. Students will work in groups to create presentations that can be published on TryScience.org and shared with other classrooms.