Excite Kids About Engineering
Posted on: Sunday, 13 April 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Cheng, Jack
Design Squad(TM) and Engineer Your Life(TM) Resources Make It Easy Design Squad is a powerful way of introducing students to the engineering process.
What do you get when you mix some rubber bands, cardboard, wooden skewers, and blank CDs? Thanks to the Design Squad Educators Guide, you get a racecar-and teachers across the country are using it to have their students engineer the zippiest racecars possible. At the Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School in Manalapan, New Jersey, Donna Falk's eighth grade science class is discovering just how fun and engaging engineering challenges can be.
Like real engineers, Ms. Falk's students work in teams, using the easy-to-follow instructions in the Design Squad Educator's Guide to assemble the parts. The cardboard forms the car body, the skewer becomes the axle, CDs are the wheels, and the rubber bands provide the power. But assembly is only the beginning of the activity. After about ten minutes of building their rubber-band cars, Carl and Maria are the first team in Ms. Falk's class ready to test their "prototype." In the testing area, they wind the axle several times (twisting the rubber band, which creates potential, or stored, energy), place their car on the starting line, and release it. Off it goes. Backwards!
After a good laugh, they return to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong. Surprisingly, they aren't discouraged. They know from watching episodes of PBS s Design Squad that testing and redesigning are vital to solving an engineering problem. In each half-hour episode, the show's teenage cast puts the entire design process into action-define the problem, brainstorm solutions, design, build, test, evaluate, redesign, and finally, share your solution. On the next try, Carl and Maria's car zooms forward. With the first problem solved, they continue to tinker until it works efficiently enough to zip six feet across the floor.
The Rubber-Band Car activity is just one of the Design Squad challenges teachers can use to nurture students' problem-solving and teamwork skills. Whether you're looking for activities to supplement your curriculum or to develop a brand new unit, Design Squad has an array of resources that make it easy to open students' eyes to the exciting world of engineering. Got an hour? A day? A week? Design Squad has something for you.
Introduce the engineering design process with Design Squad episodes
Borrowing from TV's hugely popular reality-competition format, Design Squad features two teams of teenagers who tackle a wide array of engineering challenges for an actual client-from building a machine a restaurant can use to make pancakes to a "summer sled" for LL Bean. In the final episode, the top two individual scorers battle for the Grand Prize-a $10,000 college scholarship, provided by the Intel Foundation. Design Squad is one of the few places on television where kids can learn about engineering and the rich variety of jobs that engineers do. (Season One of Design Squad premiered on PBS in 2007 with 13 half-hour episodes. Season Two's 13 half-hour episodes begin airing this April.)
Design Squad is a powerful way of introducing students to the engineering process. Each episode tells the story of how the two teams tackled a particular challenge. As they watch, students see engineering in action. The design process and its iterative nature are clearly presented and made visual throughout each episode. A graphic announces each stage (e.g., brainstorm, design, build, test, and redesign) as the teams construct their solutions. These graphics make it easy for teachers to discuss the design process with students as well as how engineers approach a project.
Over the course of the season, Design Squaders wrestle with a broad range of challenges. The show's hosts are real engineers who guide eight contestants as the teams work on projects like constructing cardboard furniture for IKEA, building hockey-net targets for a Boston Bruins player, and designing underwater prostheses for an amputee dancer. The teams learn firsthand about buoyancy as they test their kayaks, mechanical advantage while building devices to lift food waste into a composter, and gravity while designing downhill racing bikes with no pedals or cranks. By exposing kids to real-world applications of science and math concepts, Design Squad helps them become more aware of how engineering touches our lives and how it connects to a broad range of careers (e.g., technology, business, art, and fashion).
Our target audience of tweens and teens loves reality shows. So Design Squad has taken what's best about them-the competition, the intensity, and the people you come to care about-and married it to serious content. In the episodes, the teenagers joke, "trash talk" their rivals, and support their teammates. But along with the fun, the show demonstrates how engineers tackle real problems to improve people's lives and meet the needs of society. For example, in the Collective Collaboration episode, teams compete to design a human- powered, peanut-butter-making machine for a women's cooperative in Haiti, a country where peanut butter is an important source of protein. At the end of the show, Tom, a member of the losing team, still acknowledged the importance of the project. "I'm borderline glad we lost," he admits, "because the better machine is going to go to Haiti. And that's the machine that's going to work the best for the Haitians." His comment reminds viewers that the ultimate aim of engineering is to effect meaningful change.
Everything you need is on the Design Squad website
Missed Design Squad on television? Don't worry. Every episode is on the website, chapterized using the steps of the design process. Want to help your students understand what an engineer is? The website has that, too. Through a series of two-minute videos, viewers meet young engineers who represent engineering as a rewarding, creative career where you get to work with great people, solve interesting problems, and design things that matter. These videos help students better understand the profession and serve to break down negative stereotypes of engineers. The website also features online games, outtakes, detailed explanations of particular designs, profiles of the cast, an interview with host and engineer, Nate Ball, about his own inventions, and even a music video of the theme song!
The Design Squad website is packed with educational resources that make it easy to integrate engineering into your curriculum. In addition to Rubber-Band Car, there are 16 other challenges in the Parents and Educators section. Would your students like to build a dance pad that flashes lights and sounds buzzers? Build a homemade "bionic" arm? Design an unsinkable boat out of straws and plastic wrap? Those are just three examples of challenges that will engage your students and maybe, just maybe, inspire them to be tomorrow's engineers.
In addition to the activities, the Design Squad website offers program-viewing tips that teachers can use to integrate ideas from episodes into their own science and technology curricula. For teachers (and parents and after-school staff) interested in setting up engineering clubs or a community science night, there are planning guides and checklists to help make the project a success. And, to ensure it all looks good, the site features downloadable signs and T-shirt transfers. Teachers can also sign up for an electronic newsletter that provides updates regarding the show, website, and training and events held around the country.
The Design Squad activities-a close-up look
"Design Squad challenges are a great way for students to build their problem-solving skills and learn through trial and error," says Ms. Falk of her eighth graders. "I like how they discuss the designs, plan them out on paper, work out solutions for themselves, and evaluate them based on performance criteria." Teachers report that kids love the open-ended challenges because there is no single right answer, and they enjoy finding all sorts of creative ways to solve the problems that come up.
Each Design Squad challenge takes no more than an hour to complete, uses readily available materials, and requires minimal teacher facilitation. Every challenge comes with leader notes, a reproducible student sheet with easy-to-follow instructions (available in English and Spanish), a materials list, extension ideas, and an interesting story that puts the activity's engineering concepts into a real-world context.
Take the Hidden Alarm activity, for example, in which students are challenged to build a circuit for powering an alarm so small that they can easily hide it. Using a battery, wire, a buzzer, tape, cardboard, and tin foil, they come to understand simple circuit design and how to make a switch. They learn to troubleshoot when wires come loose or when switches do not connect cleanly. Because the alarm needs to be small enough to hide, students customize their designs to fit their particular hiding place.
Teachers interested in extending this project can try Dance Pad Mania, an activity challenging students to build a dance pad that sounds buzzers and flashes lights when they step on it. While Dance Pad Mania is essentially a giantsized Hidden Alarm, new questions arise, such as "How do I reinforce the switches so they'll stand up to rough treatment?""How can I run two circuits off one battery?" and "How do I wire my pad so that multiple switches trigger the same effect?" One reason students are immediately engaged in Dance Pad Mania is that they realize they are making their own version of popular video games, such as Feet of Fury, Dance Dance Revolution, and Pump It Up. A teacher in Moultonborough, New Hampshire reported that her students enjoyed this activity best because they could "build something they liked from nothing." From an educational perspective, the key insights are that engineering is fun and that it is integral to many teens' favorite activities.
While every challenge is stand-alone, teachers can develop their own units by mixing and matching challenges. Teachers interested in highlighting a theme or in giving students hands-on experience for concepts learned in science class-such as circuits, structures, inertia, or potential and kinetic energy-can group several related challenges into a unit that students can tackle during a series of classroom sessions.
In addition to giving students the satisfaction of actually building something from scratch, the Design Squad challenges also have been shown to increase students' knowledge of engineering and the design process. An independent evaluation, conducted after Season One ended in 2007, found that after watching the show or participating in Design Squad activities, "a large majority of students demonstrated a strong understanding of engineering and science concepts," including the engineering design process.
Change students' attitudes about engineering
From designing a new thrill ride for Disneyland to inventing a new life-saving medical device, there are few careers today that tap into such a diverse variety of skills and interests as engineering does. Yet only two percent of America's high school graduates choose to study engineering, mostly because they don't know what engineering is or what engineers do.
One of Design Squad's goals is to introduce kids to real engineers and the work they do. And, because low participation of women in engineering is a national issue, Design Squad's sister website, Engineer Your Life(TM) (engineeryourlife.org), has been created especially for girls. Engineer Your Life focuses on engineering as an exciting career choice and reframes engineering in terms that girls can relate to-"dream big and love what you do."
By promoting a positive view of engineering, teachers and school counselors can profoundly influence the directions their students will consider and the kinds of contributions they will make in shaping the future. And Design Squad and Engineer Your Life offer teachers a host of resources to help in this effort. For example, the websites have dozens of video portraits of remarkable young, passionate engineers. Are you environmentally conscious? So is Tanya Martinez, who is helping communities expand their renewable energy resources. Worried about world poverty? Meet Daniele Lantagne, who designs water purification systems for people around the world. Love ice cream? Pete Gosselin explains how he gets the fudge swirls just right in those pints of Ben and Jerry's. Interested in space exploration? Vanessa Aponte works on the team at NASA that will send astronauts back to the moon. Feel strongly about the defense of our country? The U.S. military is one of the largest employers of engineers in the world, including people like Lt. Darrin Barber, a sonar engineer for the Navy's newest nuclear submarine. These engineers model how their profession is a creative endeavor that enables them to effect real change in the world.
In addition to the profiles, Engineer Your Life offers many more features, including: ten great reasons to consider engineering as a career (e.g., never be bored, design things that matter, travel, be creative, and make a good salary); resources for helping teens understand the path to becoming an engineer; overviews of engineering's many interesting subfields; and advice on researching colleges with engineering programs and pursuing financial aid. For teachers and parents, there are tips on how to talk about engineering with teenagers plus a full-color brochure and poster that can be downloaded and displayed in the classroom.
Hook kids on engineering with Design Squad and Engineer Your Life
Although few young people can say what engineering is or what an engineer does, once they find out, many are hooked, and engineering becomes their dream job. Middle and high school teachers are in a unique position to help kids discover and pursue that dream. Design Squad and Engineer Your Life offer teachers abundant resources that make it possible-and easy-to bring engineering to life for students and open their eyes to a rewarding career that encourages them to imagine the future-and design for it!
Design Squad brings engineering to life by having kids work together and use their ingenuity to solve problems and build things.
The Design Squad cast wrestles with a broad range of challenges. By exposing kids to real-world applications of science and math, Design Squad helps them become more aware of how engineering touches our everyday lives and how it connects to a broad range of careers.
Visit the Design Squad website at pbs.org/designsquad
Design Squad classroom resources online.
Watch each episode! Also get the 17 Design Squad hands-on challenges (in English and Spanish), watch videos of remarkable engineers tackling important challenges, and find a host of teaching materials. Visit pbs.org/designsquad.
Design Squad activities appeal to anyone who loves using his or her ingenuity to tackle open-ended, fun challenges.
Dream big. Love what you do.
Discover why engineers love what they do and find out how to become one. Learn about the many cool areas of engineering, follow the inspiring experiences of 37 remarkable young, passionate engineers, hear what it's like to be a student in an engineering program, and find out how to get started on this exciting career path at www.engineeryourlife.org.
Turn your trash into $10,000
Yes, through Design Squad's Trash to Treasure competition, sponsored by Intel. Have your students recycle, reuse, and re- engineer everyday materials into an out-of-the-box invention. For more information, visit pbs. org/designsquad.
Jack Cheng, PhD writes for general and academic audiences from his home in Boston and teaches in the Clemente Course in the Humanities. He's disappointed that he's too old to appear on Design Squad!
Copyright International Technology Education Association Apr 2008
(c) 2008 Technology Teacher, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Technology Teacher, The
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds