New Releases by Morgan Hynes

"Picture your students designing a hearing aid for the main character in El Deafo-and then disguising it as a fashion accessory. Or imagine them helping the shipwrecked Swiss Family Robinson build a structure to keep them cool under the hot sun. Novel Engineering shows how your students can use anything from a picture book to a novel to a historical text as the basis for an engineering design challenge. This innovative resource will have your students pulling information from literature to identify a problem. Then, using details from the story, they''ll apply the engineering design process to develop functional solutions for their "clients"-the book''s characters. Novel Engineering provides you with plenty of practical guidance for integrating engineering and English language arts (ELA), including a thorough introduction to the concept and detailed implementation advice. But the book comes to life through five in-depth case studies featuring the use of novels, a biography, and a nonfiction historical text. In addition to demonstrating Novel Engineering projects in the classroom, the case studies let you practice thinking about what your own students'' work could look like and how you would respond. You''ll see that this approach doesn''t require books outside your existing ELA or social studies curriculum or a specific building-materials kit. You''ll also see that Novel Engineering can help you engage students in a powerful new way. As the authors write, "We have been encouraged by the excitement that students and teachers have shown for their work during Novel Engineering units. ... Students have taken ownership of their learning and are able to navigate the steps of the engineering design process, creating functional solutions to problems they have identified in texts.""--

The Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) strives to improve STEM education through engineering and believes every student should have the chance to engineer. Situated in Massachusetts, the first state to adopt engineering education at all levels in public schools (Massachusetts DOE, 2001), the CEEO supports the belief that engineering education starts in kindergarten and continues to develop throughout their K-12 schooling. The authors also believe that at the core of K-12 engineering is the Engineering Design Process (EDP). The purpose of introducing students to the EDP is to teach students that engineering is about organizing thoughts to improve decision making for the purpose of developing high quality solutions and/or products to problems. Three key concepts in successful implementation of the EDP are: (1) students are engineers; (2) teachers need to listen to their students; and (3) classroom environments need to change to properly enable learning through the EDP. Recently, the authors worked with the Massachusetts State Department of Education to produce a revised engineering design document that describes a learning progression for the EDP from kindergarten through high school. This white paper describes the high school portion of that document geared toward the activities or skills they associate with the EDP as defined by the current Massachusetts curriculum frameworks. This depiction of the EDP implies a cyclical, stepwise process that is rarely the case in solving real-world engineering problems. Oftentimes the task requires some jumping around from step to step. By adopting this slightly adjusted paradigm, students will recognize that the EDP does not rely upon rigid thinking, but provokes creative and outside-the-box thinking. (Contains 1 figure.).