In our afterschool curricula, Engineering Adventures and Engineering Everywhere, we strive to emphasize real-world connections that make engineering feel relevant to youth. You can always find articles, videos, and books on each unit’s resource page, but our staff is constantly finding new viral videos and articles that relate to our units. Here are four resources that will show your kids that engineering is all around them, and is constantly changing the world.

When we develop EiE curricula, we hope that educators will be inspired to take engineering learning to the next level. Every year, we are blown away by the stories we hear about the creative and unexpected ways that educators implement and build upon our curricula. From creating dances based on simple machines to inspiring students to help kids in crisis, here are the stories of a small sample of the many superstar educators who exemplify the values of EiE.

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!