2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In response to the [State Name Redacted] Standard Course of Study’s Science Standards’ 2023 update, teachers across the state began to seek application based lessons to align with the introduced Science and Engineering Practices. Through the initial implementation in the 2024-2025 school year, high school teachers and curriculum specialists alike began reporting that their schools were unable to access high quality Physical Science curriculum that was in line with the new standards. As a response to this concern, we began to look at barriers that teachers faced when being asked to access and implement skilled based curriculum with applied science and engineering.

In analyzing the relevant standards, it became clear that the application of physical science standards have a significant alignment with the engineering research being conducted and taught in the [redacted] College of Engineering’s [redacted energy center name].

This paper presents the development, implementation, and preliminary outcomes of a one-week summer program for high school physical science teachers specifically designed to address the aforementioned concerns. The program was designed to expose participants first hand to real world applications of the physical science concepts by immersing them in energy-focused research activities in the engineering labs. Each day teachers were provided an immersive lab experience, industry expertise, and a team to collaborate with curriculum leaders to create modules for implementation in the 2025-2026 school year. Each developed module had an hands-on component developed by the teacher participants themselves having drawn inspiration from the research activities they participated in. The program ran as a pilot in Summer 2025, with six teacher participants from two different counties. This study sought to understand the knowledge and aptitude before and after being a part of the immersive weeks on engineering integration within the high school science classroom and aptitudes as teachers implemented these lessons.

Standard strands addressed by the developed modules include energy, force and motion, and waves and their interactions.