If you've ever watched children at play, you know they're fascinated with building things-and taking things apart to see how they work. A 3-year-old will build a tower of blocks, knock it down and build it again. Children have a natural inclination to design and improve what they are doing. They are natural-born engineers.
Hands-on, project-based learning is the essence of the engineering activities in the 6-9 classroom. Students work in small groups to answer questions like, "Will the coffee filter, sand or cloth be the best water filter to remove the particles and color from our contaminated water?" or "If we change the order of the steps, dissolving the salt in the water first, will it improve the texture of the play dough?" They collaborate, think critically and creatively, and communicate with one another. Using an engineering curriculum researched and created by the Museum of Science in Boston, the Engineering is Elementary units of study allow our students to explore the diverse fields of engineering-from civil, mechanical and chemical engineering to aerospace, environmental and agricultural engineering. Each engineering challenge focuses on a real-world problem.
The students in Room 19 recently completed a chemical engineering unit during which they were charged with designing a process for making a high-quality play-dough. If you've ever followed a recipe, you know that the amount of each ingredient and the order in which you mix them matters. We learned that chemical engineers use these same principles when designing processes. The hands-on activities in this challenge reinforced the science concepts of "solid," "liquid" and "mixture" as our students explored the properties of different materials (flour, salt and water) and the properties of mixtures of these materials. Using the results of their experiments, they redesigned a process for making a high-quality play-dough. Then they asked if changing the amount of one of the three ingredients would improve the quality of the play-dough.
What did they discover? They learned that, in engineering, there's no single right answer; one problem can have many solutions. The engineering design process (ask, imagine, plan, create, improve) removes the stigma from failure; instead, failure is an important part of the problem-solving process and a positive way to learn. Each experiment in our challenge brought a buzz of excitement and conversation among the teams as they compared results and exchanged ideas for changes that could be made in the next round.
Through engineering challenges, our students learn how to navigate a challenge by trying, failing and rethinking their design some more. Each failure provides information needed for a future design success. It is also an opportunity to practice and develop group work skills: being sensitive to the thoughts and opinions of others, accepting and integrating suggestions and ideas from peers, and sharing responsibility for the planning and execution of tasks. A lot of learning can happen while you're having fun!
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