Engineering Encounters: Authors and Engineers

• Published in: Science and children 2019-02, Vol.56 (6), p.58-63
• Main Authors: Rouse, Rob, Rouse, Amy Gillespie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Elementary School Science; Elementary School Students; Engineering; Engineering Education; Grade 3; Literacy Education; Picture Books; Science Instruction; Science Teachers; TEACHER RESOURCES
• ISSN: 0036-8148; 1943-4812
• DOI: 10.2505/4/sc19_056_06_58

Although incorporating engineering into science instruction seems straightforward, adding more content into an already busy school day may be overwhelming for some teachers. To address this challenge, the authors created a unit that integrates engineering and literacy instruction. This article demonstrates how young students can learn sophisticated engineering principles within the context of fun and engaging lessons. During the combined engineering and literacy unit (modified from Benenson 2014), third graders created pop-up books over the course of 10 days (see NSTA Connection for unit overview and materials). To maintain a focus on engineering principles, the authors chose to focus on two simple pop-up folds: parallel and angle folds. Students wrote their pop-up books on figures of speech, a focus of their literacy class at the time. Students used a graphic organizer (see NSTA Connection) to plan their writing before transferring it into their pop-up books. Students also used writing throughout the unit to support their learning of engineering principles. After participating in the unit, the students were able to express their new knowledge of engineering principles both verbally and in writing. Students demonstrated significant growth on all assessments from pre- to posttest. Thus, after participating in the unit, students were able to demonstrate their new knowledge of grade-level engineering design standards in multiple ways: (a) recall on vocabulary assessments, (b) written language representation on essay responses, and (c) oral language representation in interviews. From this, the authors believe that by engaging in engineering practices (e.g., reverse engineering, troubleshooting, prototyping, and optimizing) related to grade-level standards, students developed a deep understanding of how to apply engineering principles to solve real-world problems.