I think the description of “what is engineering” and “what is children’s engineer” is really helpful! I was looking at your website to learn more:
https://www.hofstra.edu/ACADEMICS/Colleges/seas...
- Is all of the content online? Or are there hands-on activities for the kids?
- You menetion that “Learning Facilitators are not content providers, but rather provide a safe learning environment for the activity to occur.” Can you say more about their role and what they do?
- The category of “Habits of mind” (i.e., Optimism, Collaboration, Creativity, and STEM Knowledge) seems very broad. How did you pick the construct of “habits of mind”? It seems like the things included are more expansive than that.
Thanks! I’m excited to see more from the project as you move forward!
- Colleen

We created Children’s Engineering to help people understand why the habits of mind and the problem solving strategies of practicing engineers are essential elements of Children’s Engineering. This material comes directly from work with the National Academy of Engineering. The Wise Guys and Gals project uses Children’s Engineering as its underlying pedagogical foundation, hence the importance to the project. The video is not about the project itself, but to the larger issue of why engineering design pedagogy is an engaging STEM practice, one that we are employing.

I really like your project! But I have a question about how to make engineering relevant for students. The constraints in the example student project “design a scale model of a building that uses at least 3 attached geometric solids with a total volume…” doesn’t feel particularly “real world” to me. Am I just wrong about this? How “real” or “authentic” do projects have to feel to be motivating for students?

This is really fascinating. As a CS instructor, I feel like I was implicitly leveraging a similar approach as I asked my students to solve programming problems. In addition to the design activity that is mentioned above, what are some other examples of student projects that have been implemented?

There are several examples, of course, and one using Scratch. Basically the purpose of the challenge is to have children apply the knowledge they learned for the challenge, we call these Knowledge and Skill Builders (KSBs), so the challenge serves as a motivation for learning about STEM content. For instance, in a programming activity we challenge children to design a scenario where two sprits interact (perhaps a soccer player, goalie and ball). They learn the programming needed with KSBs and apply their knowledge with their solution to the design challenge. We do not employ ‘gadgeteering’, but rather purposeful knowledge acquisition, modeling what engineers and computer scientists do.