Insulation Lab lesson plans
Each one is a class period with everything to run it: a teacher plan, a student worksheet, an exit ticket with answers, and the standards it meets. Students need no account, and a free class saves their work.
Insulation Lab: The $12 Cooler
Students guess how much of a 30 gram ice cube an empty shoe box will keep for 30 minutes, test it, and find the box hardly helps. They write criteria and constraints, then improve the box one change at a time on a $12 play-money budget: a wrap on the ice, fill packed round it, a lining, tape on the lid. The tests table names each change, and the question becomes which change did the most for the money.
FreeInsulation Lab: Does a Sweater Keep Ice Cold?
Most students think a sweater makes heat and that a material keeps hot things hot but not cold things cold. They wrap an ice cube in a sock and it lasts longer. Then Swap the job puts a warm jar in the same box, and the same sock keeps it warm, because energy moves from warmer to cooler and the wrap slows it either way. Foil gets its own test.
FreeInsulation Lab: Predict, Then Build It
Teams arrive with their best design from The $12 Cooler. They build it for real from a build sheet in ten minutes, put in a weighed ice cube, and wait 30 minutes. While it waits they rebuild it in the app, record the prediction, and list what could make the real box differ. Then they weigh the ice, type the real grams beside the prediction, and explain the gap.
FreeInsulation Lab: Where Does the Shelter Lose Energy?
A small cardboard house sits on a 5 °C porch with a jar of hot water as its only heater. Students test it, look at it with the heat camera, and line the walls: the inside stays twice as warm above the porch. Once the walls are good, the open door costs five degrees. Then they wrap the jar, guessing it will help, and the house gets colder.