In college I had a biology professor who insisted you don’t need fancy lab instruments to do real research, just duct tape and baling wire. He challenged us to make our own research tools, and the results were pretty creative: one classmate who wanted to compare the toughness of different tree leaves made a “puncture-o-meter” out of rubber bands and a sharpened paper clip.

Young children love this kind of tinkering and problem solving. Check the EiE Video Snippet below to see the creative ways one group of first graders solved the design challenge from the EiE unit “Best of Bugs,” using materials like pipe cleaners and pompoms to engineer a device for pollinating flowers by hand.

So he probably felt quite at home today as he joined 22 third graders at Maury Elementary School in Washington, DC to work on an activity from the Engineering is Elementary® (EiE®) unit “A Slick Solution: Cleaning an Oil Spill.”

February has a lot to celebrate: National Heart Month, National Safe Boating Week, National Tortilla Chip Day, and George Washington’s birthday –which kicks off National Engineers Week.

The latter two holidays fall together by design, not by coincidence. Our nation’s first president was also an engineer. Trained as a surveyor and highly aware of the role of engineering in successful military campaigns, Washington designed many things to make life on his country estate more comfortable and efficient, including a combination plow and seed-planter and a two-story circular barn that worked as a giant, horse-powered threshing machine.

Guest blogger Martha Davis is EiE’s multimedia project manager.

Over the past three years, with support from Cognizant, EiE has been developing an online library of short videos. This library includes a set of “EiE Classroom Videos,” which feature candid footage of skilled teachers facilitating the four lessons in an EiE unit. 

To shoot these videos, I’ve been spending lots of time in elementary school classrooms. At first, it’s like visiting another country. There are new traditions and new words getting thrown around and you feel like an outsider. But after a couple of hours you’re in the swing of things and you’re absorbing some of this culture. After a day or two, you’re singing the songs and pulling out your lunch right along with all of the other kids in the class. Before you know it, you’ve adopted all of their classroom culture.

Last summer EiE’s curriculum team had quite a few projects in the pipeline. Just the same, they added a new goal: Making it easy for educators to understand how the 20 Engineering is Elementary curriculum units address the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

“We didn’t have specific funding to accomplish the project,” says Melissa Higgins, EiE’s director of curriculum development. “But we knew it was a resource teachers needed. With so many states adopting the Common Core, teachers have to make the case that they’re meeting these standards. Meanwhile there’s so much that has to fit into the school day, we want to make it simple for teachers to see all of the learning goals they can address with one EiE activity.”