Curriculum Exchange: Middle School Students Go Beyond Blackboards to Solve the Grand Challenges

Our program offers an integrated approach to engaging middle school students in activities that improve awareness and understanding of a range of STEM college and career pathways. The program is framed within the Grand Challenges of the 21 Century identified by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The focus of this paper is the curriculum used for our afterschool Innovation Clubs. The Innovation Clubs use the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotics kits, augmented with other technical resources, to investigate solar and wind energy. We integrate additional hardware, such as solar panels, third-party sensors, and common construction materials, and teach ways to apply new software techniques as students evolve their programming skills. Overall, students are identifying and designing innovative engineering solutions to some of our world’s most pressing problems. The curriculum includes the details of structured LEGO builds and specialized programming, curriculum design prompts, design challenge mats, and professional development documentation. This paper describes examples of the curriculum to give the reader a better understanding of the content, including detailed descriptions of the format of the structured builds. The goal of this paper is to disseminate to others the curriculum resources that were developed for this program. Introduction Now more than ever, there is a world-wide need for collaboration to solve major engineering challenges that must be addressed in order to maintain quality of life, national security, and a sustainable future. To address these issues, the National Academies of Science and Engineering along with many others agree that the USA needs to produce more engineers and scientists. Therefore, improvements to pre-engineering education are needed to attract more students to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) pathways. This is the purpose of the Design Technology and Engineering for All Children (DTEACh) program that is offered by the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. This program uses active learning with open-ended design projects to improve students’ understanding of STEM concepts. This paper gives an overview of the curriculum of our afterschool program, Beyond Blackboards. We particularly focus on seven structured solar energy design and build activities. The layout of the components of the structured builds is discussed, as are examples of the general curriculum. Program Background For over 20 years, our DTEACh Professional Development Institutes (PDIs) for K-12 teachers have sought to enhance STEM concepts with active learning techniques,. The program provides guidance to K-12 teachers on using design problems in their classrooms to teach applied mathematics and science. The PDIs teach engineering concepts through the use of everyday technology, directed laboratory activities, and design briefs. Since 1998 our program has used LEGO MINDSTORMS robotics as the focus for hands-on experiences. The program has its roots in engineering design theory and learning science research. To clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of this teaching approach, the entire program is taught using the methods the participants are expected to use in their classrooms. This curriculum exchange paper is presented as a part of dissemination of the program’s research and resources; information about the program and past research can be found at our website and in past publications. P ge 23360.2 Robotics Robotics technology has been shown to be an effective means of engaging students in meaningful design activities. In a study of a summer program using LEGO MINDSTORMS robotics, 10to 13-year old students built submersible boats over 3.5 hours at a summer camp. Many students let the materials drive their progress and engaged in trial and error designs, becoming frustrated during the process. Some students stayed within the problem but spent time planning and were able to generate designs. Some students spent time planning and worked towards extravagant designs, and were driven to creating designs that somehow outperformed others’ designs. One student spent too much time in planning and was not able to engage in the evaluation aspects of design. Many students completed only two aspects of the design process and then proceeded to play with their designs. This is construed as a negative, but has been used to promote redesign with younger children, whose play may be leveraged as an evaluation phase; students would interrupt their play when their design had a structural failure or to accommodate changes in the storyline of their play. In other words, robotics “play” offers multiple teaching and learning opportunities. The evaluation of our program shows substantial agreement with this example. The Beyond Blackboards curriculum discussed uses the LEGO MINDSTORMS Education NXT Base Set, and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education Resource Set, and the LEGO Renewable Energy Add-On Set. The program has been deployed extensively in a rural Central Texas school district in three middle schools and eight elementary schools. The curriculum discussed herein has been used in afterschool programs during the spring semester. We have evaluated the program using surveys, observations, and focus groups. The results indicate that the percentage of participants with a positive attitude toward having a career as an engineer increased from 45% to 71% from the fall to the spring. Additionally, the participants expressed increased aspiration to go beyond high school and complete a bachelor’s degree (from 19% in the fall to 40% in the spring), while showing decreased uncertainty regarding their ultimate educational attainment (from 19% in the fall to 5% in the spring). Teachers who participated in the program perceived positive changes in themselves that were transferred to their approaches to and content in regular classroom instruction. Grand Challenges The curriculum is motivated by elements of the Engineering Grand Challenges of the 21 Century identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Throughout human history, imagination has come to fruition through engineering, which has driven immense advances in civilization. These advances can be seen with significant engineering feats that drastically changed societies. Among the most notable are ships that created innovative channels for trade and travel; sanitation systems for improved health and quality of life; widespread development and distribution of electricity and water; automobiles and airplanes; telephones; computers; space exploration; and the Internet. Reflecting on the 20 century and looking forward in our first decade of the new millennium, the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) sought innovative ways to identify formidable challenges as the population grows and its needs and desires expand. The NAE gathered a team of leading thinkers with a wide range of experiences who are dedicated to improving the quality of life around the globe. This team explored broad realms of human concern – sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living – and generated 14 specific Grand Challenges that await engineering solutions, as shown in Figure 1. P ge 23360.3 Figure 1: 21 Century Engineering Grand Challenges. The curriculum and pedagogy of our program have evolved over the years to shift with the dynamic nature of engineering education. Our curriculum evolution now incorporates the Grand Challenges as the framework for designs. The curriculum described in this paper focuses on the challenge of “Making solar energy affordable”. Curriculum Elements The curriculum includes the detailed structured LEGO builds, specialized programming, curriculum design prompts, challenge mats, and professional development documentation. These elements are described below. Structured LEGO Solar Builds For the solar based curriculum structured builds were created to provide the students with experiences with design process and the new hardware to ensure their success when tackling open ended design challenges. Structured builds were created for seven different products and ranged from basic to advanced assemblies, as shown in Table 1. The instructions for each build start with an overview picture and description of the build. Figure 2 shows the overview picture of the completed yardstick cable car. Next, the structured build provides a detailed materials list of all LEGO and non-LEGO items needed to complete the build. This materials list includes a picture and a written description of each component to help students learn common terminology when discussing the LEGO parts. Figure 3 shows a portion of the materials list of the yardstick cable car.