2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As engineering education has become more widespread, the offerings of engineering activities have significantly expanded. There are now a plethora of engineering activities for K-12 educators to choose from when incorporating hands-on experiences into their curriculum. However, since most K-12 educators have not been trained as engineers, it is challenging for them to select activities that are reflective of the practice of engineering, and thus may miscommunicate the essence of engineering to their students.

Often educators rely on expensive third party kits that swallow up limited budget dollars and reduce the opportunity for inclusion of other activities because of cost considerations. These kits can also give the false impression that engineering is about following a recipe to get a correct result. Or, educators choose “fun” activities that dilute or lose the meaningful nature of engineering problem solving. Rube-Goldberg machines are an example of the latter choice and are used in many classrooms as an engineering activity. However, these machines are by definition a complicated process to complete a simple task, and are antithetical to the goal of engineering to solve a complex problem in the most straightforward way possible.

This paper presents a framework by which K-12 educators can measure and judge the quality of an engineering activity. The framework consists of 5 dimensions: connectedness to governing scientific and mathematical concepts, relevance to real problems solved by engineers, opportunity for students to make creative choices within constraints, presence of quantitative measurements and results analysis for comparison to design objectives, and focus on the iterative nature of problem solving. This framework has been used in professional development for K-12 educators and has been well received. In the upcoming summer workshop, participants will be surveyed and data on prior and subsequent engineering activities used by participants in their classrooms will be collected to determine the effectiveness of the framework in improving teacher confidence to teach engineering and their ability to implement quality activities.