March is an exciting time here in Boston—the snow is melting, spring is nearly here, and we’re ready to hit the road for conference season! We love meeting EiE educators, answering your burning questions, and finding out about the amazing things you’re doing in your own classrooms or districts. And when you come visit us at a conference, you’re guaranteed to have fun and learn something new. Find our booths to check out our new materials kits or ask us about a new project you’re excited about (like early childhood engineering or digital storybooks). And visit our hands-on sessions, where you’ll get the chance to get your hands dirty and dive deep into some of our tried-and-true (and brand new) engineering design challenges. Check out our spring schedule to find out where and when we’ll be in your area, and let us know if we’ll see you there!

Have you tried our afterschool curricula, Engineering Adventures and Engineering Everywhere? These out-of-school-time (OST) units challenge kids to solve real-world problems using the engineering design process. Educators are always welcome to download these units for free and source the materials, but we also offer printed binders and materials kits in our store for easy implementation. Check out the two newest units available to purchase—Music to My Ears: An Acoustical Engineering Challenge and Growing Up: Engineering Vertical Farms.

When our son was three, he would spend hours playing with wooden blocks, making a highway for toy cars, a pen for toy animals, or just the highest tower he could stack. We didn’t think of it this way, but he was engineering.

Early childhood educators have always recognized how building with blocks (and similar hands-on activities) help children develop motor skills while at the same time exercising their creativity. But these activities can also be framed as authentic engineering. That’s something the EiE curriculum team is working on right now: a framework for preschool engineering.

Want to see what a sample lesson from our preschool engineering curriculum Wee Engineer looks like? 

Happy National Engineers Week! This week on the blog, we're celebrating by highlighting our favorite engineering tool: the Engineering Design Process!

Imagine this scenario. Your students have worked carefully and enthusiastically to design a technology . . . only to discover that it doesn’t work as planned. When that sailboat doesn’t sail, or that model maglev train fails to levitate over the track, it’s a teachable moment. You want to be ready, not with answers, but with questions that help students do their own troubleshooting.

Education journalist Steven Hastings once calculated that a typical teacher asks 400 questions a day, or roughly one question a minute. That extrapolates to 70,000 questions a year, or 2 to 3 million questions over the course of a teaching career. But not all questions are created equal. Certain questioning strategies are particularly effective; here are four of our favorites.

When Camie Walker chose an Engineering Adventures activity for her fifth-grade classroom two years ago, she was thinking about how the lessons would complement her plans for English Language Arts instruction. She never expected that the real-world engineering design challenge would help her students become more resilient in the face of failure . . . or move them to meaningful social action on behalf of a young boy left destitute by a natural disaster.