Teaching Elementary-age Children the Basic Concepts of Engineering
“ That ’ s when you begin to see a decline in interest among girls and students of color ,” he says .
He also was motivated by a sense that in conversations about STEM learning , the science , technology , and math parts of that acronym are well represented , while the E for engineering is often underdeveloped . It ’ s a condition that the National Academy of Engineering attributes to teachers ’ feeling underprepared and perhaps less confident in teaching engineering-focused lessons .
Creating a resource that empowers teachers to introduce engineering concepts with more confidence , Jacobs reasoned , would not only benefit students in an individual class but also empower teachers to include more engineering content in future lessons .
Because of Falk ’ s laboratory school designation , Jacobs realized that it would be an ideal place to pilot a module , refine it by working with Dillaman and Bartow Jacobs , and ultimately share it with other schools .
The end product won ’ t be a boxed unit , Jacobs says , but a series of concepts , with enough flexibility that the project can be duplicated in any school and at a low cost .
Design Thinking
One of the risks of teachers ’ feeling less than comfortable teaching engineering is that the field can continue to seem mysterious and remain difficult to enter .
“ Many kids don ’ t get access to it ,” says Bartow Jacobs . “ It doesn ’ t attract kids who don ’ t have access already .”
One barrier is the language of engineering , including design thinking . Introducing students to those core principles was built into the project .
For Dillaman , the project has been a fantastic entry point to useful concepts like defining a problem , ideating , working with constraints , prototyping , and testing a proposed solution . More broadly , she says , students are trying out key skills like resilience and problem solving .
Before building their first ramps , her fifth graders engaged in “ speed prototyping ”— brainstorming and considering many options before zeroing in on a particular design concept .
“ We talk a lot about the design process ,” says Dillaman , “ and not getting married to a specific design .”
Along the way , Dillaman prompts students to examine their process and articulate their rationale for choosing a certain design .
“ What ’ s your rationale for sticking with this one thing ?” she asks .
Make It Interesting
In determining the content of the project , Jacobs went with what he knew : surfaces . His own research as an engineer looks at everything from the surface of flooring to the role that the surface of a brain implant can play in how well the implant takes hold in the brain .
Making sure that the friction ramp challenges were engaging and interesting was important .
“ Research has shown that when people are interested in projects with real-world applications , that boosts interest universally ,” he says , “ but it has an especially strong effect among people who are getting other messages that they don ’ t belong .”
That means girls and students belonging to underrepresented groups . In a traditional math or science class , members of both groups might start to pick up on a sense that they ’ re not expected to be good at or interested in the topic .
“ But when you have the response ‘ Oh , that ’ s an interesting problem ,’ or ‘ Let me figure out how to solve this problem ,’” Jacobs says , “ that gets people excited and engaged .”
Jacobs says that he learned a tremendous amount from working closely with Dillaman to create the challenges and build lesson plans for each stage of the project .
“ We came in with different sets of expertise and went through the process of defining the problem , then ideating ,” he says . “ We used the engineering design process to teach the engineering design process .”
No Final Success
Bartow Jacobs conducted pretests to see how well students understood core engineering concepts and
34 EN AVANT | FALL 2023