Home Schoolers In An Engineering/Education K12 Outreach Program

The Toying With Technology SM program (TWT) has been offered to preservice elementary and secondary teachers for ten years. This program is designed to explain the principles behind many of the technological innovations in wide use today. This is accomplished through hands-on laboratory experiences. This includes, but is not limited to, experiences with programming, global positioning systems, and biomedical engineering. This program uses engineering as a basis to teach math, science, technology and problem solving concepts. This paper will describe the twelve week experience of a home schooled group engaged in the TWT program. Home schooling is a growing trend in the United States and it is estimated that two million American children are home schooled each year with this number increasing by 1520% per year 1 . The students’ progress in this program was measured through specific reflection questions, as well as observations and reflections by the TWT facilitators and the cooperating home school representative and the parents of the home schooled students. The Toying With Technology SM Program The Toying With Technology SM Program at Iowa State University has been reported on many times in the literature 2-7 . This program includes an undergraduate and a graduate engineering class for education majors as well as a large K-12 outreach effort. The undergraduate course has enrolled hundreds of preservice teachers, the graduate class enrolls 15 – 20 per summer, and the outreach program touches over 2000 K-12 students per year. Included in the undergraduate class is a month-long field experience at which the preservice teachers become facilitators of engineering lessons with local K-12 students. In the fall 2005 semester this field experience was with a group of home-schooled students. Home Schooling and TWT Up until the 1850's, most children in the United States were educated at home. 8,9 Within the past twenty five years, the United States has seen a tremendous upswing in the number of children being home schooled. In 1999, there were an estimated 850,000 students being home schooled across the United States. 9,10 More recently in 2003, that number has grown to an estimated 1.1 million students. 8,9,10 It is estimated that this number will continue to steadily increase in the future. 10 Parents have decided to home school their children for a number of reasons. Recently it was reported by thirty-one percent of home schooling parents that the most important reason for home schooling was their concern about the environment of other schools. 11 Thirty percent said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction not taught in P ge 11688.2 schools. 11 The next greatest reason was that sixteen percent of home schooling parents said that they were "dissatisfied with the academic instruction available at other schools." 11 To provide continuity for home school students, many parents network themselves by joining professional groups such as the National Homes Education Network, home schooling support groups, or form regional and area curriculum teams. Many times these teams are formed to unify the home schooling process, provide support for parents, and to enrich the children’s education with outside programs such as the Toying with Technology SM program. 12 “While home schooling parents seek out these enrichment programs for many of the same reasons the teachers in a public school participate, the outcome is more drastic.” 13 According to a representative from the Ames Home School Network, “home school students participate in the TWT program because many do not receive a rich technology experience at home and TWT provides a challenging but non-threatening environment to do so. TWT also provides a chance for students to work with their peers and collaborate in a group they may not have access to at home.” 13 During the fall, 2005 semester twenty home school students met on the Iowa State University campus once a week for twelve weeks. Three ISU pre-service teachers and one parent volunteer met with the students as support. Students were given a variety of projects to work on including; basic LEGO car programming, building and testing a LEGO egg drop creation (see Figure 1), building and testing a paper egg drop, and participating in a biotechnology engineering presentation. For the LEGO projects, students were allowed to use the materials supplied in the LEGO Mindstorms © kit. The home school students ranged in grade level from 4 th through 10 th grades and were paired according to their age. The main goal of this experience, along with all TWT experiences, is that students will learn to problem solve. Students were also to meet goals of the NSES (National Science Education Standards) 14 , NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics) 15 , ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) 16 , and the NSSC (National Social Studies Council) 17 . These goals are outlined in Table 1. Also, because the home school students were working collaboratively when they might work alone most days, a second goal was for the home school students to work with a partner in completing each of the tasks, this goal is also addressed in the NSSC standard.