Each Thursday on the EiE Blog, we bring you tips for teaching elementary engineering. Today's guest blogger is EiE professional development provider Elissa Jordan.

When I work with teachers who are just starting to implement Engineering is Elementary, I often see resistance to the idea that failure is highly valued in engineering.

When a student designs a technology that doesn’t work as intended—say, a model maglev train that doesn’t levitate, or a solar oven that doesn’t get hot enough—it’s distressing! We want students to have positive, affirming experiences in school, not be discouraged.

So it's tempting to “help” kids who seem to be making ineffective design choices by purposefully leading them to better ideas. It seems like a supportive strategy. But in fact, it can be counterproductive.

Occasionally on the EiE Blog, we introduce you to the folks on our team and the work they do. Today, meet Richard Sutton, research coordinator. We’ve got a mountain of data coming in from a major, NSF-funded study, and Richard is the gatekeeper. Student assessments, journals, performance evaluations . . . more than 200,000 pieces of data must be entered into our system, and Richard makes it happen.

Richard is a noteworthy EiE’er for another reason. Over the past several months on the blog, we’ve been talking about engineering habits of mind. His personal story is a perfect example of the habit of mind of persistence.

The new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are bringing engineering into elementary classrooms, opening the door to new ways of learning but also posing a challenge when it comes to assessments. Engineering is a team effort, but most assessments are designed to be taken by individual students.

When kids work in a group, what can you say about each individual student with respect to level of engagement? performance? learning progress? EiE is developing new assessments that address these questions as a component of E4, an NSF-funded study that compares the effectiveness of two elementary engineering curricula.

The Common Core State Standards for math are pushing elementary educators to re-think how to teach math. How do you go beyond facts and skills like adding and subtracting or the times tables to helping kids develop a deep understanding of math concepts?

Using Your Math Skills is an Engineering Habit of Mind

Engineering activities are an ideal framework for meeting this challenge. Since January, the EiE Blog has been exploring “engineering habits of mind”—ways of thinking that kids develop as they engage in hands-on engineering activities. One habit that engineering promotes extremely well is the ability (and inclination!) to apply math knowledge to problem-solving. Kids love to tinker and build stuff, and classroom engineering puts these natural inclinations right to work.

In college I had a biology professor who insisted you don’t need fancy lab instruments to do real research, just duct tape and baling wire. He challenged us to make our own research tools, and the results were pretty creative: one classmate who wanted to compare the toughness of different tree leaves made a “puncture-o-meter” out of rubber bands and a sharpened paper clip.

Young children love this kind of tinkering and problem solving. Check the EiE Video Snippet below to see the creative ways one group of first graders solved the design challenge from the EiE unit “Best of Bugs,” using materials like pipe cleaners and pompoms to engineer a device for pollinating flowers by hand.