What’s a Good Age to Start Engineering?
Excerpts from an article in the the Fall, 2009 issue of The Bridge, published by the National Academy of Engineering:
There is some debate about whether the focus of pre-college instruction should be on preparing kids to learn engineering in college (e.g., focusing on math and science and stimulating interest in engineering) or on trying to develop engineering skills and thinking per se. Clearly skills in math and science are a requirement for filling the pipeline of future engineers.
A number of existence proofs have shown that teaching engineering is developmentally appropriate for kids, if it is done with the proper support. At the high school level, for example, thousands of kids engage in robotics competitions that require large teams of students to collaborate on meeting mechanical and electrical engineering design challenges.
I run a regional high school design competition in which the top teams from participating high school science classes bring in the results of eight-week-long innovative design projects (Reynolds et al., 2009). Teams are judged on how well they integrate science into innovative design solutions. Surprisingly, 9th graders (from biology classrooms) sometimes outperform much older children (from chemistry, physics, or environmental sciences classrooms), suggesting that innovative engineering design skills can be learned before the late teenage years.
A number of engineering-based curricula, even at the early elementary school level, are being used to teach thousands of U.S. children from diverse backgrounds. The success of these curricula suggests that some aspects of engineering are generally accessible to a broad range of children at many different age levels.
Click here to read the full article.
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