Illustrations

• Have your students create drawings of their steampunk ideas. In addition to creating imaginary steampunk technology, they should place the technology against historical backgrounds, such as London in the 1880s or New York around 1900. They may have to do a bit of research to get an idea of what these locations looked like at the time.
  
  

Models

• Another approach is to have your students create simple models of their imaginary steampunk machines. They can create these models in a number of ways, from taping and gluing construction paper to applying papier mache to a wire frame they have built. When they paint these models, they should stay away from bright colors, since steampunk technology tends to be metallic gray, black or rusty.
  
  

Alternative Timeline

• An interesting exercise that will get your students thinking about real history as well as imaginary history is to have them create a historical timeline incorporating steampunk ideas and technology. This timeline should start out the same as real history, and then at some point the introduction of steampunk technology should cause it to diverge from real history.
  
  

Short Story

• One effective way to get your class thinking about steampunk ideas is to have all of them write a short story based on their alternate steampunk timeline. Like any short story, the focus should be on a particular character. This can be an entirely fictional character, but a more interesting approach is to take historical characters and place them in the alternative steampunk universe. For example, someone might write a story in which Teddy Roosevelt funded a steampunk-based space program.