Novel Engineering in Early Elementary Classrooms

This chapter provides another rich example of an integrated approach to early engineering education, namely the Novel Engineering program, which is designed to teach engineering and literacy in elementary and middle school classrooms. Through this approach, students derive engineering problems from classroom texts and then move through the engineering design process as they build solutions that are influenced by the characters, settings, and plots about which they are reading. The chapter introduces the Novel Engineering approach, shares how it has been implemented at the early elementary level, and leads the reader through examples of engineering and literacy integration. Finally, the chapter discusses what research associated with this project has found.