Tag Archives: engineering

EcoTarium Exhibit Engineering Challenge!

Posted on June 22, 2017 by

Before heading out for summer break, my partner Wendy Pavlicek and I put together a pair of videos designed to drive an engineering challenge for our Grade 2 students who will be investigating habitats next year. The challenge is designed … Continue reading →

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Beyond Toothpicks and Marshmallows: Engineering Earthquake Resistant Structures

Posted on June 8, 2017 by

  I’ve been searching high and low for an earthquake engineering design challenge that gave students more control in planning and evaluating their earthquake-resistant constructions than the common “toothpicks and marshmallows” challenge often seen in primary and middle grades. So … Continue reading →

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Engineering Pollinators (and Next Generation Engineering Curriculum!)

Posted on March 8, 2016 by

To bolster our curriculum council’s understanding of how engineering will be better integrated into our science curriculum, the focus of today’s extended PD was an agricultural engineering challenge to be implemented into our future 4th grade “Structure and Function” unit. The council meeting’s was … Continue reading →

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Educators as “Curriculum Engineers”

Posted on May 18, 2015 by

I’ve been spending more and more time in elementary classrooms supporting and facilitating engineering units. One of the design process models we often use is the Museum of Science’s “Engineering is Elementary” design process, which asks students to “Ask, Imagine, … Continue reading →

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Integrating Engineering into Elementary Science Curriculum

Posted on May 13, 2015 by

For the fourth installment of the Science Center’s “Next Generation Science Methods” course we modeled with our elementary educators how to effectively integrate the grades 3-5 engineering standards into a 5th grade earth systems and human activity unit. Before beginning teachers … Continue reading →

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Engineering Animal Enclosures

Posted on November 30, 2014 by

An introduction to classification has long been a staple of the fifth-grade curriculum in Burlington. But with a traditional classification test feeling a bit stale the teachers at Fox Hill looked to the Science Center for a way to spice … Continue reading →

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Engaging Students in SummerSTEM: Programming and Robotics

Posted on July 18, 2014 by

Today marks the end of a wildly successful pilot of the Burlington Programming/Robotics SummerSTEM camp, spawned after the well received “hour of code” earlier this year by me and Francis Wyman’s IT Specialist, Ben Schersten. With the focus on learning … Continue reading →

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