The Common Core State Standards for math are pushing elementary educators to re-think how to teach math. How do you go beyond facts and skills like adding and subtracting or the times tables to helping kids develop a deep understanding of math concepts?

Using Your Math Skills is an Engineering Habit of Mind

Engineering activities are an ideal framework for meeting this challenge. Since January, the EiE Blog has been exploring “engineering habits of mind”—ways of thinking that kids develop as they engage in hands-on engineering activities. One habit that engineering promotes extremely well is the ability (and inclination!) to apply math knowledge to problem-solving. Kids love to tinker and build stuff, and classroom engineering puts these natural inclinations right to work.

Last week I joined 3,000 educators in Washington, DC last week for Teaching & Learning 2015, a conference organized by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to engage educators, policymakers, elected officials, and educational researchers in efforts to improve teaching and learning.  Here are some of the takeaways:

The 2015 NSTA national conference wrapped up last weekend in Chicago. One timely conference strand was “Student Learning—How Do We Know What They Know?”

STEM assessment is a hot topic. The Next Generation Science Standards have created a demand for a new kind of assessment; meanwhile, President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget would support more effective evaluation of the outcomes of federal STEM programs. But right now there’s no widely accepted approach for monitoring and measuring the “three-dimensional learning” NGSS is designed to support—where 1) the core ideas within each science discipline are connected to 2) the practices that real scientists and engineers use in their work through what NGSS calls 3) “cross-cutting concepts.”)

The National Science Teachers Association holds its annual national conference later this week in Chicago, IL, and one conference strand will be “Teaching Every Child by Embracing Diversity.” The goal is to help educators find new ideas and new resources for science teaching that meet the needs of all students.

For the past two years Dr. Heidi Carlone, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro School of Education, has been studying equity and access in classrooms, using EiE as a curricular tool. We checked in with her for a progress report.

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.