Football season is in full swing and the EiE staff is excited to root for their favorite teams—and to toss around the personalized football that we were happy to receive from our friends at Colorado STEMworks! If the middle schoolers in your afterschool program also have football fever, we have a timely engineering activity for you to implement. Our Engineering Everywhere unit Put a Lid On It: Engineering Safety Helmets introduces youth to the field of biomechanical engineering—a field of engineering that combines mechanical engineering and biology—as they explore the design and construction of helmets. We’ve found that youth are most engaged with engineering when they’re working on problems that connect to their own lives, and Put a Lid On It is the perfect opportunity to engage your kids with compelling real-world connections to football—one of the most popular sports in the United States.

The EiE team creates every curriculum unit using extensive feedback from our closest collaborators: educators! Each unit undergoes multiple rounds of pilot testing to ensure that educators can implement engineering with ease and students can have a rich learning experience. Our quality control doesn’t stop at the educator guide—we make sure every pipe cleaner bends just right, and that our smiley-face erasers aren’t too distracting for preschoolers. We carefully select and test each material so that by the time an EiE kit arrives in an educator’s classroom, they can feel confident that it works! This fall, we’re piloting units from our preschool, kindergarten, and afterschool curricula, supplemental curriculum materials, and digital storybooks. EiE staff are assembling 81 pilot kits by hand to send to sites across the country. To give you an idea of just how many pom-poms and purple foam sheets that entails, we created an infographic breaking down what it takes to orchestrate a national EiE pilot.

One of EiE’s crowning achievements is our Professional Development (PD) program. Elementary educators who come into our workshops knowing almost nothing about engineering leave feeling like EiE experts. But as much as our PD staff would love to show every single teacher the best practices to implement EiE, they can’t be everywhere at once. So when a district or school needs to prepare many teachers to implement EiE and provide the long-term support they know their teachers need, they send their professional development providers to one of our Teacher Educator Institutes.

EiE aims to create the next generation of problem solvers. To achieve this we know our engineering curricula needs to engage ALL students. When our founder Christine Cunningham started the EiE project, she realized she had an incredible opportunity to introduce a new discipline to students without worrying about previous experiences, entrenched models of learning, or biases against the subject. She began this process in earnest by reviewing literature on elementary school STEM education and talking to educators and engineers about what elementary engineering could look like. From this research, Cunningham and the EiE research team identified the fourteen inclusive design principles that we still use today to develop our curricula.

This November, the EiE professional development team is offering two free webinars designed to improve your teaching practice: on November 8, "Effective Questioning Strategies for Your STEM Classroom" and on November 15, "Meaningful Integration of STEM in Elementary Classrooms." In these sessions, you'll learn from the experts as you study classroom footage, align lessons to national standards, test out new questioning strategies, and more! Read on to learn more about these interactive, one-hour sessions and register today!