Description
What our 20th Century and Technology lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: 20th Century and Technology explores several of the most significant technological advances of the 20th century. These include radio and TV, nuclear technology, penicillin, and the internet. This lesson is for students in 4th grade, 5th grade, and 6th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Options for Lesson
The “Options for Lesson” section of the classroom procedure page outlines additional activities and variations that you can use when presenting this lesson to your students. To demonstrate the difficulty historians face in selecting the most important events of a century, have students create a timeline that begins with the date they were born and ends on the current day. Explain to students that they are to make a timeline of the 12 most significant events they think have occurred during their lifetime. Then have students share and discuss why they chose one event over another.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page provides an extra paragraph of information to help guide the lesson and remind you what to focus on. The blank lines on this page are available for you to write out thoughts and ideas you have as you prepare the lesson.
20TH CENTURY AND TECHNOLOGY LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
The 20th Century and Technology lesson includes three content pages. You probably know that a century is 100 years. But did you know that historians sometimes organize history in 100-year periods? Although it makes sense to categorize time chronologically, compiling a list of the most significant events during that time generates considerable debate among historians. Historians often debate whether a cultural event is more significant than a technological one, or if a natural disaster takes precedence over a war. Is the election of an American president more important than the change of a government on another continent? You can see how difficult it is to decide. Every historian has a point of view and an opinion.
Think about it. If you were to make a list of events during a year of your life and rank them from most to least important, what day comes first? Perhaps your birthday or another holiday? Maybe it’s the last day of school and the start of the summer. Historians have the same problem. They don’t always agree on which events should be on the list! The 20th century was a time when there were literally dozens of important events that affected nearly everyone worldwide. So, let’s dive into a timeline of the significant technological changes brought forth in the 20th century, beginning with January 1, 1901, and ending with December 31, 2000.
Mass Production & the Assembly Line (circa 1901)
The assembly line had been in use since the late 1800s. Some historians credit Eli Whitney (of cotton gin fame) as creating the first assembly line. Around 1901, Ransom Olds and Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacturing industry by introducing the assembly line to mass-produce automobiles. Soon, other industries adopted mass production and assembly lines, producing thousands of consumer goods less expensively while providing good-paying jobs for Americans. Before the 20th century, most goods were made by hand, one at a time.
Airplanes and Air Travel (1903)
In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds. However, it demonstrated that it was possible to create a machine that could lift off the ground and fly. From their short flight, a global industry was established, connecting the world by air and transforming the way freight was shipped. Annually, the airline industry is estimated to generate over a trillion dollars globally and continues to expand.
Radio and Television (1920s–1930s)
Long before satellites, cell phones, and cable, the radio was the primary means of communication for most people, providing them with news and other information. The radio was pioneered by Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi is often credited with inventing the radio. However, his invention was built upon the work and patents obtained by Tesla in the late 1890s. Television was a gradual process with very primitive forms appearing in the late 1920s. It would not replace the radio as the primary source of communication until better technologies appeared after World War II.
Penicillin (1928)
Penicillin (1928): Possibly the most important advancement in medical science was the invention of penicillin. Alexander Fleming ushered in the era of antibiotics, reducing the number of deaths from infections and paving the way for a new frontier in medical research. Penicillin enabled the effective treatment of conditions such as pneumonia. It played a crucial role in saving millions of lives during World War II.
Nuclear Technology (1938)
Several German scientists (chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch) made a landmark discovery: nuclear fission. We often associate nuclear fission with the first atomic bomb, secretly created in a research facility called the Manhattan Project (1945). Atomic energy revolutionized the way in which electrical power is generated and remains in many parts of the world as the primary source of energy. The advancement in atomic fission led to numerous related discoveries in chemistry and physics, redefining our understanding of the universe.
Humankind Ventures into Space (1957)
Sputnik, a Russian satellite launched in 1957, marked the beginning of the space race. The first human to go into space was the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited our planet once before returning to Earth. The United States quickly countered, launching the first American in space, Alan Shepard, on May 5, 1961. Several space flights occurred until 1969 when the US landed the first men on the moon (Apollo 11), astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Later, the Americans developed the space shuttle, which led to the emergence of new industries in the 21st century, including commercial space flights and advanced satellite technologies.
Genetics, Medicine, and Biotechnology (1953–1999)
James Watson and Francis Crick opened the door to a new field: genetic engineering. They discovered the double helix, the key to understanding DNA and the foundation of personalized medicine. In December of 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray performed the first organ transplant. He successfully transplanted a kidney from one twin brother to the other, leading to other life-saving organ transplant surgeries. The discoveries created an innovative new field of medicine called biotechnology, which fused advanced medicine and genetics with technology.
Telecommunication, Personal Computing, and the Internet (1970–1999)
Although the telephone became common in homes in the 1920s, it wasn’t until advances in telecommunications led to the development of the cell phone, which was untethered from phone lines. The history of computers is complex, and some historians credit Charles Babbage with the first invention in 1830. The first electronic version was ENIAC, developed in 1945. However, it was the home and personal computer (Kenbak 1, 1971) that revolutionized the industry. The internet began in the 1960s, primarily with military applications. Then, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web further expanded the internet, leading to its widespread public use in the 1990s.
As you have read, these are some of the technological advances in the 20th century that made that era one of the most dynamic in history! Several other technological advances easily could have made the list. It’s easy to see why historians have such a difficult time deciding what’s most important to write about a whole century.
20TH CENTURY AND TECHNOLOGY LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The 20th Century and Technology lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. Each one will reinforce students’ comprehension of lesson material in different ways and help them demonstrate when they learned. Use the guidelines on the classroom procedure page to determine when to distribute each worksheet to the class.
20TH CENTURY TOYS ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For this activity, students will review a page of 20th-century toys and mark which ones they’ve played with. Either with a partner, in a group, or as a class, tally up the marks to see which toys appeared to be the most popular.
IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE PRACTICE WORKSHEET
Students will have to decide which advancements were most important to society. They will rank each of the technological advancements in order of most (1) to least (8) important regarding its contribution to improving people’s lives. Then they will explain their rankings for each technological advancement.
ANCIENT ORIGINS HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment requires students to research each game in the table to figure out its origin. For instance, the original hula hoop, made popular in the 20th century, is actually very old. It dates all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks in 5 BCE.
Worksheet Answer Keys
There are answer keys for the practice and homework worksheets at the end of the lesson plan document. Correct responses are in red to make it easy to compare with students responses. Given the subjective nature of the practice assignment, the answer key is simply a sample response. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
