Professional Development
Engineering comes to High School
UT at Austin has announced that the National Science Foundation, NSF, has joined an impressive array of sponsors, including Exxon Mobil and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a $12.5 million grant to fund the popular UTeach program to prepare High School Engineering Educators. But, I think individual teachers can do it for a lot less.
I haven’t heard of this program being extended to New York City, but last summer I worked with a technology teacher,Steve May, who was able to participate in something similar at Brooklyn Tech. He turned that 2 week experience into the Young Engineers School, a summer program for middle school students. We spent the month of July helping kids build and launch bottle rockets, build and calibrate a breaking system for model cars, build and test tower structures. The program was enormously successful and easily attract funding to make it a regular part of the curriculum, thanks largely to Steve’s management.
This program was designed for middle school children, but the science and engineering design elements can be scaled to meet the grade level objectives for any age group and a quick search on the internet will reveal an almost limitless number of possible projects. My experience with the program has inspired me and I’m brainstorming several ideas cross curriculum projects both for the science classroom and after school academies. None of them will cost $12.5 million to develop or use. You’ll see them take shape here in the near future.
I have meet students looking for work in a physics lab, who didn’t know what that a nut is also a part of a fastening device; I tutored a student for the LAST who didn’t know what a tide was, let alone why it happened. Both had degrees and new their subject, but that isn’t enough. The teaching of science, and particularly physics, has to lose its ivory tower status. To have a literate population, Science must scratch out a living in the everyday world. I believe there is great potential in interdisciplinary work, particularly with math and technology, but also in ELA and Social Studies.
We have to be able to do it all folks.
Discussion
2 comments for “Engineering comes to High School”
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On reflection I think I have the details of Steve May’s program incorrect. I’ve asked him to clarify
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teacher Reply:
September 29th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Steve May responds
1. Course I took was known as the W.I.S.E. program (workshop in instrumentation, sensorys and engineering at Polytechnic University not Brooklyn Tech.
2. Y.E.S. program was devoted to S.T.E.M instruction - main purpose or
mission was to give middle school children a way to apply the concepts of math and science to technology and engineering activities in a fun, exciting and interactive way.
3. By giving them this experience it might help or cause some of them
to use the engineering skills, problem solving, critical thinking and teamwork throughout their education and into the real world. They might enroll in more math and science fields and become the leaders of tomorrow.
4. Y.E.S. program was at Albert Leonard Middle School in New Rochelle, N.Y
5. We used trigonometry, statistics, laws of motion, geometry, excel spread sheets and graphs, spatial relations, compression, tension, discussed current engineering issues.
6. We had yourself and two engineering student interns, local building dept. inspector for New Rochelle.
On another note, Today I’m meeting with The Driver Relationship Manager from GM in regard to the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and him coming to present at school and/or the summer program. I’m excited about this and hopefully good will come of this meeting.
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