Healthy Living
You only have one body, and you want to keep it healthy! Staying healthy involves making good choices every day about nutrition and exercise. It sounds simple, but understanding what those good choices are can be confusing. How much should you eat? What are empty calories? Why is exercise so important? What should your heart rate be, and what is the connection between heart rate, exercise, and staying healthy?
The projects and resources on this page will help you explore all these questions. You won't find boring lectures about how to eat better, how much to exercise, or what your ideal weight should be. Instead, you will find exciting hands-on projects and activities that help you understand the biology behind good nutrition and heart-healthy exercise and their connection to obesity and diseases. The more you know about the science of good health, the better choices you can make for your own health!
Explore Healthy Living with Hands-on Science Projects
Understanding Nutrition
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Use a homemade calorimeter to compare the amount of Calories (chemical energy) in foods. |
Learn about different types of fats and use a solvent to extract fats from potato chips, chocolate, and almonds.
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Are all orange juices the same when it comes to Vitamin C? Experiment to find which juice has the most Vitamin C.
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Explore the connection between eating healthy foods and improving sports performance.
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Discovering Heart Health
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Track your heart rate throughout the day to see which activities cause it to beat faster.
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Experiment to find out if athletes have faster heart rate recovery times than non-athletes. |
Track your pulse after different activities to find out which activities elevate your heart rate most. Works with Google's Science Journal App!
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Build a model of the human cardiovascular system and investigate the effect of the diameter of an artery on blood flow rate.
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Making Healthy Choices
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Is soda a health problem? Experiment to see firsthand how much sugar is in favorite non-diet sodas. |
Can playing video games count as exercise? Experiment to see how effective games are at raising heart rate.
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Experiment to find out if pretty packaging can influence kids to eat healthier foods.
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Why do you need to replenish electrolytes when exercising and what are the best sources?
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Teach Healthy Living with STEM Lesson Plans
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Measure how the amount of carbon dioxide in exhaled breath changes with exercise levels. Works with Google's Science Journal App! |
Make and use homemade stethoscopes to measure heart rate and investigate how heart rate is affected by exercise.
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Build a simple model to demonstrate what happens to blood flow when heart disease narrows a person's arteries.
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Measure the energy content of food by literally burning it using a device called a calorimeter that they will build themselves.
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