Engineer Your World: An Innovative Approach to Developing a High School Engineering Design Course

Abstract

Abstract An Innovative Approach to Developing a High School Engineering Design Course Every year, thousands of American students enroll in high school engineeringcourses, but few of these courses are built on a foundation of solid research in thelearning sciences, couched in the context of a rigorous engineering design process andscaffolded to build engineering habits of mind. This paper describes the creation andpiloting of such a course. The team that designed this innovative high school course comprised universityengineering faculty, clinical engineering faculty (professionals with experience as bothpracticing engineers and secondary classroom teachers), engineering research fellows,and learning sciences faculty. With input from high school teachers and secondarycurriculum specialists, the team defined desired student learning outcomes, documentedthe constraints of a high school classroom, and identified course design principles basedon research in the learning sciences. The team then developed a scaffolded courseframework that builds a narrative of engineering and its role in the world with themesranging from the personal to the global and beyond. The acquisition of engineering design skills is central to the course experience. Bybenchmarking existing engineering design processes and measuring them againstprofessional experiences in industry and academia, the course development team wasable to produce a unique, multi-level characterization of the process. This process is“discovered” by the students at the beginning of the course and used to structure allsubsequent units. Accurate application of the engineering design process requires the acquisitionand application of engineering habits of mind that are central to the practice of theprofession. This course guides students to develop these engineering habits of mind(derived from key sources including the NAE report “Engineering in K-12 Education”and the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook). Each unit introduces students to a fewnew habits of mind while reinforcing those learned in previous units. In this way, thecourse helps students build their intellectual toolkit for addressing a series of structuredengineering design challenges. By the end of the course, students are prepared to solve amore open-ended “free design” challenge. The course is being piloted with more than 230 students in eight high schoolsduring the 2011-2012 academic year. The pilot schools range from rural to suburban tourban, with student populations between 200 and 2800 students. The smallest pilot classhas just seven students, while the largest has 30. Project faculty, staff, researchers andevaluators are gathering and documenting student performance and teacher feedbackfrom the pilot to inform course revisions. Early results are anticipated for inclusion in thispaper.