Courses · Engineering & Physics · Kindergarten to Grade 12
Engineering & Physics
How did people learn to fly, to float great ships, to span rivers, to build high and to bring clean water and light into every home? Each lesson starts with a real moment from history, takes it apart to see what the builders had to learn and how they learned it, explains the physics and the engineering, and then has the student build and test the idea at home.
Choose a grade
Ages 5–6
Kindergarten
Pushes and pulls, a paper bridge, the wise man’s house on the rock, foil boats, the Wright brothers, and spinning tops and bouncing balls.
Ages 6–7
Grade 1
Ferris’s wheel, the Pont du Gard, Volta’s battery, Bazalgette’s sewers, the Mayflower, Lilienthal’s wings, and the yo-yo and kaleidoscope.
Ages 7–8
Grade 2
Moving the Thunder Stone, covered bridges, Otis’s safe elevator, Morse’s telegraph, Viking longships, Bell’s kites, and the Slinky and the wagon.
Ages 8–9
Grade 3
The Antikythera mechanism, the Brooklyn Bridge, flying buttresses, Chicago raising its streets, clipper ships, wing-warping, and the Etch A Sketch.
Ages 9–10
Grade 4
Smeaton’s waterwheels, truss bridges, Brunelleschi’s dome, Edison’s filaments, Hoover Dam, the Erie Canal, the Wrights’ wind tunnel, and the Super Soaker.
Ages 10–11
Grade 5
Newton’s laws, the Roeblings, Otis and the Empire State Building, Bazalgette’s sewers, the Vasa, the Wrights’ method and the Mars rovers.
Ages 11–12
Grade 6
Ohm’s law, Vitruvius and great domes, water treatment, the Plimsoll line, control surfaces, Goddard’s rockets and a first microcontroller.
Ages 12–13
Grade 7
Steam engines, truss analysis, the Citicorp story, transistors and Arduino, AC versus DC, the Panama Canal and the jet engine.
Ages 13–14
Grade 8
Momentum and crumple zones, a balsa bridge contest, CAD, logic gates and the Raspberry Pi, the internet, Apollo and a capstone.
High school
Grades 10–12
Physics
Galileo’s ramps to Maxwell’s equations: motion, forces, gravitation, energy, momentum, rotation, fluids and heat, waves and light, and electricity and magnetism, with labs that use toys as apparatus.
Grades 9–12
Electronics & Microcontrollers
Volta and Ohm to the Raspberry Pi Pico: circuits, components, transistors, soldering, digital logic, Arduino and Python. Requires an Arduino starter kit, a multimeter and a Pico.
Grades 9–12
Engineering Design, Robotics & Drones
Requirements and CAD, materials and the LEGO brick, mechanisms, fatigue and safety factors, robots that sense and decide, FIRST and VEX, drones under FAA rules, and a capstone.
Grades 9–12
Architecture & Civil Engineering
Vitruvius to the Burj Khalifa: drawing, architectural history, structures and materials, bridges, tall buildings, foundations, water and roads, and a design studio.
Grades 9–12
Shop & Trades
Screws, bolts and glues, woodworking, home construction, home electrical, HVAC, welding, 3D printing, small engines and auto mechanics: the science behind each trade and safe, real shop projects.
Grades 9–12 · Job pathway
Tech Careers: IT Support & Web Development
A job pathway with two doors that open without a degree: fix computers and networks and earn the CompTIA A+ and Network+, or build websites on free curricula and earn a portfolio — with the home lab, the contests, the honest teachers and a 12-month starter plan.
How every lesson works
The five high-school courses are full-year courses of 10 units and 50 lessons, each lesson taking three sessions (teaching and worked examples, a lab or build, and a practice set), with unit tests, a midterm and a final.
Each K–8 course is one school year: 8 units of 4 lessons, one lesson a week in two sessions. The same eight subjects return every year, a little deeper each time: forces and machines, bridges, tall buildings, electricity, public utilities, boats and ships, flight, and robots.
- Warm-up. A few minutes of noticing, predicting or remembering.
- Watch. A hand-picked YouTube video from a museum, NASA, an engineer or a science teacher, with a note on when to watch it.
- Learn. The story, how they figured it out, the physics, and the engineering, in short sections a parent can read aloud.
- Picture study. A public-domain photograph, patent drawing or painting to look at closely and talk about.
- Build. The student repeats the discovery in miniature, with a fair test, measurements and a round of improvements.
- Engineer’s notebook. Sketches, data tables, predictions and “what I would change.”
Each unit ends with a short review and a portfolio build with a simple rubric. In the last week, hold a family engineering fair.
Bonus: Toy Lab. Every K–8 course ends with an optional ninth unit on the physics and design of toys, such as tops, yo-yos, the Slinky, the LEGO brick, the Frisbee, the Super Soaker and the pinball machine. Students learn who invented each toy, why it works and how it is made safely, and they build or take apart one of their own.
No kits are required. Every build uses household and craft-store materials. Each unit also lists optional kits that fit it, such as KiwiCo, CrunchLabs, Snap Circuits, LEGO, micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. School Launch has no ties to these companies.
Every course can also be downloaded as one printable PDF, with the video links printed in each lesson.
Videos open on YouTube. Each one was checked for the lesson and for the content, but YouTube shows its own recommendations and ads around them, so parents should stay nearby.