2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Parents Becoming Informal Engineering Educators: Workshop for Parents (Resource Exchange)

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Technical Session 12: Resource Exchange

Parents play very important roles in their children’s education. From at-home activities to making decisions about where they send their kids to school, and how they spend their time together, they have impact on their children’s learning. A more important role of parents was highlighted since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Parents suddenly had to become teachers. Teachers who never received training to teach. That was especially true for parents with early elementary-aged and younger children. Parents used available resources to help their children learn different subjects. Resources on some subjects were more accessible and available than others. And teaching subjects like engineering that had very limited resources became the least of parents’ priority, if not eliminated completely. Thus, in an effort to help friends with young children, and to expand engineering education resources for parents, we planned a series of workshops for parents to help teach their kids engineering using everyday items.

In this resource exchange, we share the guideline we developed for parents so they can easily develop wide range of play-based engineering activities integrated in science, math and story-telling. We provide examples of the activities we and participating parents developed, as samples to be used by other parents and educators.

Authors

Dr. Hoda Ehsan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-317X The Hill School [biography]

Hoda is Chair for Engineering and Computer Science Department and the Director of Quadrivium Design and Engineering at The Hill School. She holds a Ph.D in Engineering Education from Purdue University, M.S. in Childhood Education from City University of New York, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Bahonar University in Iran.
Dr. Abeera P. Rehmat http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4977-5830 Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]

Abeera P. Rehmat is a Research Scientist II, at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Education Integrating
Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC). She has experience conducting research in engineering education that
spans pre-college up to the collegiate level. Her research interest involves investigating how engineering and computer
science education can foster students critical thinking and problem-solving skills to prepare them for the challenges of this
evolving world.
Samieh Askarian Khanamani University of Cincinnati [biography]

I am Samieh Askarian Khanamani, a second year of Ph.D. student in Engineering Education from the University of Cincinnati. I have 10 years of experience as a vice principal and STEM teacher in STEM-based elementary schools and host of several workshops for kids and parents about engineering and hands-on activities in STEM. My research area is in PreK-12 and diversity. Have an engineering background in my Master's and Undergraduate.

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