The National Science Foundation (NSF)’s second annual “STEM for ALL Video Showcase” opens today, and you’re invited. This event is like the Sundance Film Festival for STEM education research: it includes more than 150 NSF-supported projects, all sharing short videos that showcase their work in STEM education. A production by Engineering is Elementary’s talented videography team is one of the entries . . . and there’s a “people’s choice” award. So please visit, view, and vote!

We hit a landmark recently—more than 10 million students have been reached by the Engineering is Elementary curriculum. Not all of that learning happened during the school year! Increasingly, we’re hearing about districts adopting EiE as a summer school curriculum. One of these districts is Colorado Springs District 11. Here’s their story.

It’s National Teacher Appreciation Week! Personally, I‘m sending retrospective appreciation to my mom, a first-grade teacher who made a big difference to lots of kids. Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Mom taught at a Title I school in Massachusetts . . .  where she was considered a renegade for insisting that science be an important part of the school day. Her students grew seedlings, hatched baby chicks, and engineered a lunar lander from a refrigerator box. 

Matt Johnson likes sports. He used to play baseball, basketball, and football; after college, he took up golf; and today, having just completed a Ph.D. in education at The Pennsylvania State University, he says that sports experience has shaped both his personal philosophy and his dissertation research. “As a serious competitor, failure doesn’t discourage me, it makes me want to improve,” he says. “So why do schools place such a stigma on failure?”

Matt’s research; which he presented yesterday in a special seminar at the Museum of Science, Boston; explores failure in elementary engineering classrooms. His data source is candid classroom videos collected by Engineering is Elementary researchers for our National Science Foundation-funded research project, E4 (“Evaluating the Efficacy of Elementary Engineering.”)

You know how inspiring it is to watch an exemplary teacher engage every student in the classroom. EiE Classroom Videos give you that experience. These concise productions show you a condensed version of each EiE lesson in about 10 minutes. Watch a skilled teacher make connections between science and engineering, deal with challenges on the fly, and deploy effective teaching strategies.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the release of four Classroom Videos for the unit Sounds Like Fun: Seeing Animal Sounds. If you’re teaching this unit, you’ll definitely want to take a peek at these videos.