[This post is part of our series, Engineering Practices in the Classroom, which explores what engineering practices are, why they matter, and what they look like in real classrooms. Today, we’re focusing on a foundational practice: using a structured process to solve problems.]

[This is the first post in a series about Engineering Practices — why they matter and how teachers can bring them into the classroom. Stay tuned for the series!]

Whether you're a facilitator, educator, or event organizer, if you are planning a STEM club, afterschool program, or community event, you will need flexible, hands-on, high-quality activities that are easy to set up and run. We created YES STEM Event Activities to take students ages 6-12 through multiple cycles of designing, testing, and improving their solution to a real-world problem, even in short, flexible, or drop-in settings. Children as young as age 4 can participate with help from a caregiver. Each kit includes all materials, signage, and facilitator prompts you need to run an engaging, memorable STEM experience, whether participants drop in for 10 minutes or stay for an hour.

Engineers apply computer science knowledge to problem solving, and we think children can, too. For more than two decades, we’ve been partnering with PK-12 educators to bring authentic, hands-on engineering challenges into the classroom. Core to these efforts has been helping educators support students as they engage in engineering practices—the habits and behaviors engineers rely on when solving problems. One of the practices that we want educators and students to be aware of is that engineers use computer science knowledge when designing solutions. 

"Computers can occasionally mess up.” Hearing those words from a middle schooler feels like a small victory. Today’s middle schoolers are digital natives, but that doesn’t mean that they understand the algorithms underlying the applications that they use. Most kids trust computer output without question because, most of the time, computers are efficient, helpful, and accurate… until they aren’t.That moment of doubt—of healthy skepticism—signals something powerful: a student beginning to think critically about how computational tools work and why they behave the way they do. When students pause and consider the algorithm behind the output on their screen, we know our Youth Engineering Solutions Computer Science module achieved one of its goals.