These students designed parachutes to land a space rover on another planet!

Check last month's education news and you'll notice third graders at a school in Cleveland designed a restaurant, middle schoolers in Cincinnati were tending beehives, and sixth graders in Michigan strategized about how to protect Earth from the damaging effects of solar flares. These somewhat offbeat activities are part of a wider trend to make project-based learning a fundamental aspect of the school day.

Here at EiE, we know that nothing compares to watching young engineers at work in your own classroom. So we strive to bring you the next best thing—a collection of videos that range from snippets that show short vignettes of engineering in action to in-depth classroom videos that take you through units in classrooms around the U.S., lesson by lesson. We’re happy to announce 14 new snippets and 2 new classroom videos featuring the units A Sticky Situation: Designing Walls and Now You’re Cooking: Designing Solar Ovens. 

When we wrote the storybook Omar’s Time to Shine, the story of a boy named Omar in Egypt who designs a lighting system for his school play, we never could have imagined that it would find its way into the hands of a volunteer who leads STEAM activities in Park City, Utah’s historic Egyptian Theatre. You might call that kind of alignment “serendipitous.” Wendi Laurence certainly does! When Wendi attended an EiE Teacher Educator Institute and found the Lighten Up unit, she immediately knew that it would be a blockbuster success in the Egyptian Theatre’s YouTheatre STEAM program. Of course, the story begins a little earlier than that—with an idea and a napkin!

Your EiE Teacher Guide offers more than just lesson plans; it has teaching tips, assessment, and other useful extras. Did you know the EiE website is also packed with handy resources that help you teach elementary engineering? With our latest web redesign, these helpful teaching tools are more find-able than ever! Just click the “EiE Resources” tab and let us take you on a tour . . .

EiE storybook characters are diverse by design. There are 20 different protagonists, all from different backgrounds, races, family situations, and abilities, and it’s for one good reason: students feel inspired when they read stories about someone they can identify with.

This intentional diversity was a plus for Claudine Conover, a PreK-5 science teacher at a small school in the Bronx, as she searched for STEM lessons that would resonate with her students.