Add to List

Product Highlights

• Engineer a physical model of a circulatory system with a 2-chambered, 3-chambered, and 4-chambered heart and blood vessels throughout a body.
• High school engineering design challenge with enough materials for 1 individual student or lab group.
• Teacher prep, 60 minutes. Completing the engineering challenge, approximately 6 class periods. Includes 1-year access to digital resources
• Carolina Kits 3D®—Lab activity that designs a solution for an engineering problem to support NGSS and 3-dimensional instruction.

Using a unique combination of tubing, pumps, and one-way valves, student teams compete to model the heart's pumping action and gain a better understanding of how blood circulation works in the body. Students construct models of blood flow through a closed-loop system and perform a series of increasingly complex design challenges to demonstrate their knowledge of how vessels, heart valves, and contracting chambers work together.

Time Requirement
Teacher prep, 60 minutes. Completing the engineering challenge, approximately 6 class periods.

Digital Resources
Includes 1-year access to digital resources that support 3-dimensional instruction for NGSS. Digital resources may include a teacher manual and student guide, pre-lab activities and setup videos, phenomenon videos, simulations, and post-lab analysis and assessments.

Performance Expectation(s)
HS-LS1-2
HS-ETSI-2

Crosscutting Concepts
Systems and System Models

Disciplinary Core Ideas
LS1.A: Structure and Function

Science and Engineering Practices
Developing and Using Models

Learning Objectives

• Describe how vessels, heart valves, and the pumping action of the heart work together to circulate blood throughout the body.
• Apply understanding of how a heart works by creating models of blood flow through a closed-loop system.
• Develop an understanding of how engineering combined with biology can be used to diagnose and solve health problems.

Prerequisite Knowledge and Skills
Prior experience in integrating engineering into modeling biological systems is useful in this experiment. Students should understand the workings of open and closed circulatory systems along with the functions of heart chambers, vessels, valves, and pumping action in circulatory systems. They should also know the differences between systemic and pulmonary circulation.