2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Many organizations are engaged in advancing hands-on engineering-based learning. Whether in formal classrooms or out-of-school programs, providing opportunities for youth to design, make and build offers opportunities for youth to experience open-ended engineering design activities. The Playful Engineering-Based Learning (PEBL) project has been working with 8 organizations across the U.S and around the world to advance their work in engineering education. One key challenge identified by many of the participating organizations was supporting open-ended engineering design activities. The PEBL Constructopedia was designed to help support educators in engaging in engineering design activities that included a wide range of possible solutions.

Designed for youth in elementary and secondary settings, the Constructopedia centers providing support for using craft (paper, tape, popsicle sticks) or recyclable materials (CDs, bottles, cardboard) in engineering contexts. Rather than providing full instructions for creating a design, the Constructopedia provides examples of mechanisms or structures that may be incorporated into larger design projects. For example, the Constructopedia details how to create wheels out of a variety of materials from CDs and dowels to straws and bottle caps. The student-facing resource allows educators to support students' design ideas more efficiently ("Maybe the legs on page 3 would help your design) while still foregrounding student agency and creativity.

The Constructopedia was developed with funding by the LEGO FOUNDATION and is available as a free download from https://sites.tufts.edu/pebl/constructopedia/. Sample copies will be provided at the resource exchange as well as a link to download the complete PDF.