Over the past decade, TeachEngineering has compiled an impressive digital library of more than 1,400 free, engaging, teacher-tested engineering lessons and activities for use in science, engineering, technology, and math classrooms.
Based at the Integrated Teaching and Learning Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s College of Engineering, the searchable collection recently got a makeover. Recent improvements include videos of popular activities on TeachEngineering’s YouTube channel, aligning activities with the Common Core mathematics and Next Generation science standards, a roster of Maker Challenges, such as snazzy sneakers, based on the engineering design process, and a section called “Sprinkles,” with abbreviated versions of TeachEngineering’s most popular activities streamlined for use in after-school programs or other informal education settings.
Activities and curricular units can be browsed by subject area, standard, and key word, with a featured activity each month. There is no fee to join or to use the site.
Initially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, TeachEngineering has evolved from five original partner schools to include contributors from more than 60 universities, including Duke, Worcester Polytechnical Institute, and Tufts. Volunteers are invited to submit lesson plans and review contributions.
Photo: The TeachEngineering team
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The College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program, and Khan Academy, an online nonprofit offering resources and videos, are partnering to create free test-preparation and course materials for teachers and students in every AP subject.
“You might say we’re offering every AP teacher a personalized assistant in their classroom,” College Board president David Coleman told Education Week guest bloggerStephen Sawchuk. “We’re giving them an ability throughout the year to show what good enough work is, to have confidence that assignments derived from these materials are at the right level of rigor.”
The new teacher supports, which will roll out in the 2019-20 school year, will include an online dashboard for use in developing customized quizzes, homework, classroom activities, and AP practices. Teachers will be able to access previously administered AP exam questions and prompts as well as unit guides and related unit tests. They also can assign instructional videos and practice questions from Khan Academy, which will host additional practice materials, videos, and supports for students. Up first: AP Calculus AB and BC videos, expanding within a few months to include economics, biology, and physics, among other subjects.
The initiative comes in response to teachers asking for personalized resources to help them break down AP expectations and better prepare students for the year-end exams. It’s also a reflection of the increasing diversity of AP students and their academic backgrounds, Coleman said.
As is the case now for SAT prep materials, students need not create profiles to access the Khan Academy AP resources. Those who do log in, however, will be able to set up personalized programs for gauging their progress over time towards mastery of the material.
Will free online resources help level the field for students and schools that can’t afford private test prep? In a report released in 2017, the College Board and Khan Academy found correlations between the number of hours spent on the practice system and gains in scores on the PSAT to the SAT. The College Board plans to conduct similar research on the AP resources.
Meanwhile, Khan Academy has teamed up with a Stanford University research group to offer LearnStorm (video, above). The free, six-week Back to School challenge for teachers and students aims to refresh skills while cultivating a growth mindset. Registration opened August 15, 2017, with activities beginning in September.
The 23 STEM badges represents the largest programming roll-out in nearly a decade. The Girls Scouts partnered with such organizations of Code.org and the Society of Women Engineers to develop the new badges, which will focus on such activities as programming robots, going on environmentally conscious camping trips, and developing novel bridges. The badges fall into three major themes: Think like and Engineer, Think like a Programmer, and Think like a Citizen Scientist.Some of the badges introduce kindergarten and first graders to robotics and engineering. Older scouts will learn about artificial intelligence and how to formally present their work.
A 2016 Girls Scouts report described myriad benefits of Girl Scouts STEM programs for girls, including increased confidence and interest in pursuing STEM as well as different opportunities to display leadership, for example as the go-to troubleshooter on a FIRST Robotics team. According to the organization’s 2017 Impact Study, Girl Scouts are almost twice as likely as non-Girl Scouts to participate in STEM (60 percent versus 35 percent) and outdoor activities (76 percent versus 43 percent).
The new STEM badges join a set of cybersecurity badges that the Girl Scouts launched a month ago.
Failure – and learning from it to improve a process, product, or system – is integral to engineering design. Yet in most classrooms, the ‘F word’ represents just the opposite: a total absence of learning, effort, or even intelligence.
How can teachers change their perspective and incorporate “fail words” to support student learning, inquiry, and recovery from setbacks?
American Society for Engineering Education‘s Pre-college Engineering Education Division leaders Pamela S. Lottero-Perdue, professor of education and director of Towson University’s Integrated STEM Instructional Leadership post-baccalaureate certificate program, and Elizabeth A. Parry, an engineer and Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Mentoring winner who headed North Carolina State University preK-12 outreach program, have spent years researching perceptions of failure and use of “fail words” by elementary teachers in the engineering curriculum.
They presented on the topic at the National Science Teacher Association’s 2016 STEM Forum (photo, above) and won an ASEE Best Paper award for their research. (Parry, right, was named an ASEE Fellow in 2016.) Engineering is Elementary’s blog post [7/7/15] includes a link to their paper as well as a description of when teachers (rarely) did use fail words. Lottero-Perdue’s work with Harford County (Md.) Public Schools elementary teachers also was featured in a 2012 ASEE Prism magazine cover story.
The mixed-methods study examines how teachers who have taught one or two units of the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum for two years reported on: students’ responses to design failure; the ways in which the teachers supported these students and used fail words (e.g. fail, failure); and their broad perspectives and messages to students about failure.
In addition, the study explores how strategies, perspectives, messages, and fail word use may change after two years of engineering instruction. Data collected included 74 surveys, containing both quantitative and qualitative items, and 10 in-depth, semi-structured interviews.
Findings included that the elementary engineering classroom is a complex space in which teams may or may not experience design failure. For those that do, they—and, in turn, their teachers—may respond to this experience in a wide range of ways. Also, after two years of teaching engineering, teachers felt more comfortable preparing students for design failure experiences, and responding when design failure occurred. Most also felt more comfortable using fail words, and when they used these words, learned to do so with context and care.
Photo: Setbacks are part of engineering design process, as engineer and educator Liz Parry demonstrates after testing an activity to teach buoyancy and displacement. Her soda-straw boat sank immediately while its counterpart – fashioned by an ASEE staff member with no engineering or science background – stayed afloat as “cargo” was loaded.
Stitched circuits and musical instruments made from marshmallows are among the latest offerings in the 2017 Maker Camp, a virtual DIY camp sponsored by Make magazine. This year’s theme is electric circuits – and the fun things you can make with them, including greeting cards that light up. There are six projects, or pathways, in all, most of which would make fun classroom design activities as part of a science unit on electricity.
Searching for a real-world maker camp? Find a library or other maker space in your community!
There is an age restriction to create a Google+ profile and attend hangouts. Campers under 13 can attend Maker Camp on Google+ with a parent, using his or her Google+ profile.
An assistive-technology pioneer wants people with disabilities to see engineering as a great career.
When a tractor-trailer struck Rory Cooper during a bike ride, leaving him paralyzed, it cut short his Army service. It would have ended a competitive track career as well had he kept the clunky “80-pound chrome behemoth” of a wheelchair that hospitals issued back in 1980. But Cooper had another idea: designing a nimbler device that he could race.
Cooper, a runner and Olympic track-trials qualifier before the accident, started building his own chassis and racing wheels in his mom’s automotive machine shop. Enrolling at California Polytechnic State University, he refined his design in the engineering lab, where his professors modified workbenches so he could participate fully. Soon, Cooper was racing a modified version of the hospital wheelchair.
What began as a hobby became a calling. After obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees at CalPoly, Cooper proceeded to earn a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering with a concentration in bioengineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Hired by the University of Pittsburgh, he founded a lab credited with breakthrough wheelchair technologies ranging from adjustable backrests to ergonomic push-rims. Along the way, he set a world record, clinched a Paralympic bronze medal at the 1988 Seoul games, and won numerous athletic competitions, taking home a gold medal in swimming in 2015 and completing the 2017 Dick’s Pittsburgh Marathon in the handcycling division. His achievements landed him on the Cheerios box in 2009 and selection as a 2017 finalist for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America medal, aka the Sammies, the highest honor for federal employees.
Being an athlete and wheelchair user lets Cooper, a professor of bio- and mechanical engineering, physical medicine, and orthopedic surgery, solve problems other engineers might not even see. Consider the need for sturdy, lightweight frames that won’t crack from use or falls. One of Cooper’s early innovations, the square cross-section cross brace, is now taken for granted in today’s wheelchairs. So are folding models that can navigate narrow airplane aisles. His 20 awarded and pending patents include shock absorbers, joysticks, and a robotic strong arm to help transfer a person from one surface to another, such as from chair to bed. He also has authored or co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed research papers, published books on rehabilitation engineering and wheelchair selection, and co-edited seminal works on caring for combat amputees and the medical rehabilitation of wounded warriors.
(The May 2017 New Mobility magazine cover story featured Cooper and his lab’s inventions. He also explains the how engineering is changing what it means to be disabled in this TIME video (above) and the science and engineering behind paralympic wheelchairs and other assistive devices for athletes in a 2012 Engineering for Mobility video and interview by NBC Learn.)
From the pioneering outpost that Cooper created in 1994, Pitt’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) has grown to a staff of 70 engineers, physicians, physical and occupational therapists, and students who conduct more than 74 clinical studies to improve the mobility and function of disabled patients. Beyond assistive devices, Cooper’s team – 30 percent of whom have disabilities – was among the first to quantify the importance of sports and recreation in the successful rehabilitation of people with disabilities. Other projects include a “smart wheel” that measures the forces on racers to improve performance, a “throwing chair” suitable for novice and Paralympic shot put, discus, and javelin athletes, and MEBot, a curb-climbing robotic wheelchair shown in the photo, above, being put through its paces by Cooper at the 2016 Cybathlon trials. His team’s air-powered PneuChair, a completely submersible wheelchair, debuted this spring at Morgan’s Wonderland – a theme park build for people with disabilities in San Antonio, Texas, that opened a new water park for 2017.
“The whole idea is to facilitate social integration and full participation,” Cooper explains. He foresees a time when advances in robotics, materials, and rapid prototyping will revolutionize rehabilitative engineering, with machines doing what humans cannot and affordable devices that are truly customized for each individual. America’s aging population means demand is sure to surge. “This is a really exciting time to be in this field, and will be for at least the next quarter century,” says Cooper.
But adaptive innovations – and involving users in their design, research, and even marketing – are just part of his vision. “We need to transform this from a medical issue to a human rights issue” and focus on “inclusion and quality of life” rather than health, insists Cooper. More broadly, he hopes his work as a researcher and award-winning teacher will inspire by example. “It’s not about better technologies for people with disabilities, but to get society as a whole to raise their awareness that engineering is a great profession, including for people with disabilities,” he says.
Even with his first 80-pound clunker, Cooper recognizes he was better off than the 50 million people worldwide who need wheelchairs and can’t get them. So, armed with a $2.6 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Cooper and HERL’s associate director of engineering, Jon Pearlman, launched the International Society for Wheelchair Professionals to distribute equipment, mostly in developing countries, provide a higher level of standardization and oversight, and teach wheelchair repair.
by Mary Lord
This article originally appeared in the September, 2015, issue of ASEE’s Prism magazine and has been updated to reflect new breakthroughs and awards.
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Tim Balz caught the engineering and entrepreneurial bug as a student at Plainfield (Indiana) High School, where he saw a student in a manual wheel chair struggling to maneuver between classes. He decided to do something to help. He traded his moped for a broken electric wheelchair, fixed it up, and gave it to the student. That was the beginning of Freedom Chairs, the nonprofit that Balz founded, and an engineering pathway that would lead to recognition as a champion of innovation.
Balz, a three-letter athlete, had a less-than-stellar academic track record. But his industrial technology teacher saw a spark, convinced him to quit sports and help start the school’s first robotics team. “That was the best decision of my life, without a doubt,” Balz recalls. “It makes me realize how close I was to not doing what I’m doing now. And I love what I’m doing.”
As an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Balz kept Freedom Chairs going during breaks, dipping into his college money and enlisting classmates to help – even teaching them how to use power tools. The nonprofit has refurbished and given away 130 motorized wheelchairs around Indiana, the U.S., and even internationally.
During an internship with Intel, he used his expertise to develop the Connected Wheelchair, a smart wheelchair endorsed by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking – with whom Intel researchers were working to create a system to give him a voice. As a student intern at Rose-Hulman Ventures, he helped assemble a high-tech motorized wheelchair for wounded U.S. soldiers and other clients.
Such efforts have won Balz multiple awards, including a 2016 TechPoint Mira Rising Star award. He also was recognized at the 2014 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and received the 2012 Hall of Fame Award from the American Red Cross of Greater Indianapolis, the 2012 Power of Children Award from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and the Indiana Pacers’ Indiana Heroes Award.
Balz hasn’t slowed down. He was on a panel at the American Society for Engineering Education’s 2017 annual conference in Columbus, Ohio in late June, entitled “Finding a Passion and Making It Happen,” about Rose-Hulman’s new program promoting entrepreneurship, making, and innovation through hands-on projects that benefit society. Like Freedom Chairs.
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Learn how your students can tap into interactive, real-time arctic research or use a new teacher-proven tool for embedding engineering into your courses. These are just two of the presentations ASEE’s experienced engineering educators will be making at NSTA’s annual STEM Forum & Expo in Orlando July 12 to 14 as part of the American Society for Engineering Education’s “Commit to P-12 Engineering Education” effort.
Check out our schedule, below, and please stop by ASEE’s table in the exhibit hall to explore eGFI and other ASEE resources designed to help you engage and inspire your students!
Thursday July 13
Polar ICE: Bringing the Poles to Your Classroom (Presentation)
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Grade level 6 -12
Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, Emerald 1
Networks of sensors and sensor platforms are being deployed across polar systems to provide near real-time data from the poles. Polar Interdisciplinary Coordinated Education (ICE) provides classrooms access to to the Antarctic and Arctic regions through polar data, observations, and interactions with the scientists. Polar ICE offers lessons and student research ideas available for immediate classroom implementation, as well as professional development workshops for teachers across the country.
Presenter: Liesl Hotaling, President, Eidos Education, Highlands, N.J., and Vice President of Education for the Marine Technology Society. Read her paper on using sensors to teach environmental science to middle and high school students in the Summer 2012 issue of Advances in Engineering Education.
2. AMP-Up Middle School Science and Math Through STEM Connections Classrooms (Presentation)
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Grade level 6-8
Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, Emerald 1
Learn about the integrated middle school curriculum materials designed as part of Georgia Tech’s AMP-IT-UP NSF Math/Science Partnership project. The materials, created for STEM Connections classes and core math and science courses, are available for free download.
3. Using an Engineering Frame to Map Engineering Design into Your STEM Curriculum (Presentation)
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Grade Level: 4-7
Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, Emerald 1
Teachers want to embed more engineering design into their curriculum, but many are bound by guides that limit engineering activities. Discover how to use a frame structure to embed an engineering design activity that meets current content standards in your lessons. This frame routine has been tested with teachers in several Florida school districts and was rated highly useful as a tool.
Presenter: Nancy Ruzycki, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.
4. SENSE IT: Student-Built Water Quality Sensors (Hands-on workshop)
1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Grade level: 7-12, college
Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, Gainesville 2
The SENSE IT program challenges participating students to construct, deploy, and interpret data from their own water quality sensors. To build and understand their sensors, students must use a wide range of core knowledge of mathematics and physical science, as well as learn practical hands-on technology skills such as soldering and debugging circuits.
Presenter: Liesl Hotaling, President, Eidos Education, Highlands, N.J., and Vice President of Education for the Marine Technology Society. Read her paper on using sensors to teach environmental science to middle and high school students in the Summer 2012 issue of Advances in Engineering Education.
Imagine not being able to pick up a glass of water, open a door, or play catch because you had no hands.
Now imagine you’re a biomedical engineer and can help amputees regain dexterity – with the help of a home 3D printer.
That’s what high school students discovered by designing, building, and testing prosthetic hands at the University of Oklahoma’s Boeing Engineering Days at the Gallogly College of Engineering in June.
“What I really want students to get is it’s so accessible,” Rachel Childers, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, told the Norman Transcript. With 3-D printers costing less than $200, “you could print this hand at home.”
Each team had to demonstrate how their hands operate by picking up and moving objects from one place to another, for example using a downward motion of the wrist to close the fingers. Electrodes attached to their arms let students measure the electromagnetic pulses that activate muscles – and then use that information to predict who would win an arm-wrestling contest.
In addition to building prosthetic arms, the students learned about developments in tissue growth, brain imaging, and drug delivery methods for cancer patients.
Teachers also had a table in this class. Science teacher Richard St. Denis told Oklahoma City’s News 9 that he encourages his students to look into jobs in science and technology as a way to unlock their creativity. “In a lot of public education now it’s all about just memorization of stuff where in the scientific community they value creativity and really that’s what we’re seeing in engineering,” St. Denis said.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports, George Mason University bioengineering students created a prosthetic that allows 11-year-old Isabella Nicola, who was born without her left hand and part of her forearm, to keep playing the violin. University of Central Florida engineering undergraduates built a “cool robo-arm” for a six-year-old whose parents couldn’t afford a $40,000 prosthetic, while University of Louisville biomedical engineering students make 3D printed prosthetic hands for kids in their rehab engineering course.
And USA Today published a feature on biomedical engineering students at the University of Cincinnati (photo, right) who started a club – EnableUC – in 2015 to make $20 3D-printed hands for local kids. So far, the undergraduates have built hands and other prosthetic devices for 46 individuals, including three-year-old Ella Morton, shown above in the YouTube video.
Photo/Joseph Fuqua II/UC Creative Services
The first recipient was a 13-year-old boy named Brady who was born with a partially formed right hand and had trouble steering a bike or throwing a ball.
Engineering students are involved in creating assistive technologies beyond artificial limbs. Ohio State University’s College of Engineering launched a Toy Adaptation program in 2015 that puts students together with community members to take apart and re-engineer toys so kids with disabilities can use them. The group hosted a service event at ASEE’s 2017 Annual Conference in Columbus that drew dozens of families, engineering students, and teachers.
State University’s College of Engineering launched a 
