The District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has announced an ambitious new plan to enhance educational equity with “Cornerstone Assignments,” rigorous, engaging learning experiences for each grade (K – 12) that will be implemented district wide this coming fall. The overall goal is to offer students in the same grade across the district the same learning opportunities. 

We're thrilled to share that under the Cornerstone plan, six EiE units have been selected for implementation (one unit for each elementary grade, K – 5). This means that by the end of the 2016 school year, all 22,000 students at all 75 of the district's elementary schools will have experience with hands-on engineering.

Three years ago, in August of 2012, EiE launched a new research project called “Exploring the Efficacy of Elementary Engineering,” or E4 for short. It’s what researchers call a “gold standard” efficacy study—a controlled research study designed to tease out exactly what it is that makes an elementary engineering curriculum effective. The large-scale investigation is supported by a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This month, our research team wraps up the “field work” phase of the E4 investigation. Our crew has been collecting data from nearly 600 classrooms in three states (Maryland, Massachusetts, and North Carolina). In other words, we're following more than 14,000 students as they have their first experiences with classroom engineering.

Recently on this blog we introduced a college professor who uses EiE curriculum units as textbooks for preservice teachers. Today, meet a faculty member who’s innovating with EiE in a different way: her students get experience teaching engineering activities in a local afterschool program.

Kim Case is a lecturer at California State University – Fullerton whose students do their observations and student teaching at Rio Vista and Melrose elementary schools in Placentia - Yorba Linda Unified School District; both schools have significant numbers of English language learners and students from low-income households. The story begins with Case’s students creating practice lessons for elementary students at the two schools.

If you ask someone to draw a picture of a scientist, chances are, they’ll sketch a figure wearing a white lab coat. Ask someone to draw an engineer, and they might sketch a figure wearing . . .  a white lab coat.

Scientists and engineers do have a lot in common, but they also have significant differences. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) create new expectations that classroom teachers will integrate engineering with science instruction. But many teachers, and elementary teachers in particular, feel poorly prepared for this challenge.

With this need in mind, we've created a short video for our Spotlight series, a collection of videos that illuminate effective classroom practices for teaching elementary engineering with the EiE curriculum. “The Difference Between Science and Engineering” takes concise look at the connections between the two subjects, how they’re different, and why it’s important to teach them together in elementary school. 

The word “theory” has a precise meaning for scientists . . .  and often a different meaning for politicians (“An evidence-based explanation of a phenomenon” versus “Oh, it’s just a hunch”). In much the same way, the word “failure” seems to have one meaning in the engineering workplace and another in school (“Failure is normal, it helps you learn” versus “You got a failing grade”).

“As we bring engineering into elementary classrooms, we are bringing in a new way of thinking and speaking about failure,” says Dr. Pam Lottero-Perdue, an associate professor of science education at Towson University with a background in engineering. “Teachers will need to understand BOTH ways of thinking about failure—to become guides who help students navigate that border crossing.”