On Friday, October 9th, Steve Holle facilitated an Engineering is Elementary (EiE) workshop at CSUN for EED faculty and classroom teachers and administrators from Stanley Mosk, Emelita and Plummer elementary schools. The EiE curriculum was first introduced to CSUN when Dean Michael Spagna and Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, S. K. Ramesh, hosted Dr. Ioannis Miroulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston at CSUN in April 2013 to explore our mutual enthusiasm for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). EiE was developed by the museum to be an all-inclusive project-based program that incorporated research, evaluation, and assessment into every aspect of its cross-curricular design. Furthermore, each facet of EiE was teacher-tested in real-life classroom environments from its inception.
Ibia Gomez, principal of Plummer Elementary collaborates with Dr. Sandra Chong and Dr. Susan Belgrad in the Planning and Create stage of the Engineering Design Process.
President Barack Obama as a preferred pathway to college and career success has recently promoted STEM. He has stated that the United States desperately needs to fill at least 100,000 STEM related jobs and that number is steadily increasing each year. It as been said, that half of the jobs in the next ten years are in fields that have yet to be invented. CSUN’s President Diane Harrison too has advocated STEM education as a way to better engage students and enhance their occupational future.
If at first you don’t succeed... Improvement is an essential element of the Engineering Design Process.
Consequently, K-12 schools are currently seeking professional development in STEM. They are exploring how to integrate their instructional best practices across the curriculum while implementing Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that, for the first time, include engineering. EiE does it all. Children are actively engaged in hands-on learning that addresses the 21st Century learning skills of Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity.
We did it!
Steve Holle traveled to Boston in July 2013 to participate in the museum’s comprehensive EiE training and over the past couple of years has introduced EiE to a wide variety of schools. Here teachers, working in cooperative groups, have only 20 minutes to build a two-foot tower constructed out of 3 x 5 index cards that must support a toy soccer ball for at least 15 seconds. Each team member internalizes the Engineering Design Process as they problem solve this challenge.