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

As standards for K-12 engineering learning emerge with the development of the Next Generation Science Standards, the nation’s school systems will likely struggle with the question of whether engineering should be employed as a tool for teaching science and mathematics content (i.e., embedded in science and mathematics courses) or treated as a unique discipline in which science and mathematics are employed as tools for solving design challenges (i.e., offered as a standalone course). Acting on the belief that the latter paradigm is a more appropriate depiction of engineering, the UTeachEngineering project at The University of Texas undertook to demonstrate how rigorous engineering content can be deployed in secondary classrooms by developing a year-long high school engineering course built on a foundation of solid research in the learning sciences, couched in the context of a rigorous engineering design process and scaffolded to build engineering skills and habits of mind. This paper explains why UTeachEngineering, a program initially designed to prepare pre-service and in-service educators to teach design-based engineering courses at the secondary level, shifted focus early in the project to developing, piloting, evaluating and refining such a course. It describes the target student population for the course, details the engineering development work required, describes the researchand practice-based principles upon which pedagogical decisions are based, and offers a view into the course content. Finally, it describes the piloting of the course in a small number of Texas high schools during the 2011-2012 academic year, discusses how feedback from this pilot is informing course revisions, and outlines plans for leveraging a partnership with NASA to expand implementation of the revised course and pilot a new teacher mentorship model in 2012-2013. Background and Motivation Every year, thousands of American students enroll in high school engineering courses, but few of these courses are built on a foundation of solid research in the learning sciences, couched in the context of a rigorous engineering design process, and scaffolded to build engineering skills and habits of mind. This paper describes the creation and piloting of such a course: Engineer Your World, a product of the UTeachEngineering project at The University of Texas at Austin. The UTeachEngineering project was launched in 2008 with a Math and Science Partnership (MSP) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Originally focused on preparing inservice and pre-service high school teachers to teach engineering, the project was agnostic on which course materials those teachers should use with their students. However, an NSF site visit in the project’s second year led to a shift in project priorities as site visit representatives argued convincingly that professional development activities must be designed with a particular end (i.e., a well-designed high school engineering course) in mind and that the development of such a course was, therefore, the first and most critical outcome of the UTeachEngineering MSP 12 . In its 2010 report to the project, the NSF site visit team urged UTeachEngineering to carefully define the content and pedagogy of a new high school course by making explicit the core content of engineering design, clarifying student learning outcomes, and establishing research-based course design principles before developing course materials 12 . UTeachEngineering responded to this charge by convening a course design team comprising engineering faculty, clinical engineering faculty (professionals with experience as both practicing engineers and secondary classroom teachers), engineering research fellows, and learning sciences faculty. Incorporating feedback from high school teachers involved in an earlier pilot project, this team undertook a rigorous, 18-month course design process. Defining the Target Student Audience for Engineer Your World The target student audience for Engineer Your World was defined by the opportunity to which the UTeachEngineering project has responded: the approval of Engineering Design and Problem Solving to be offered for fourth-year science credit to students in an academic track in Texas. The state-developed standards governing the course content are detailed in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Engineering Design and Problem Solving 17 . While Engineer Your World was developed assuming the state-mandated prerequisite courses of Geometry, Algebra II, Chemistry and Physics, the development team has since identified adaptations that make the course appropriate for use with students in earlier high school grades. Standardizing the Engineering Design Process The Engineer Your World design team accepted as a first principle that the course would teach engineering through design by structuring all units as engineering design challenges. While engineers frequently refer to “the engineering design process” as a means of solving such challenges, they rarely have the same representation of that process in mind. Recognizing the need for a standardized representation of this process to structure students’ experiences, the team undertook to clearly articulate such a representation. This effort, which is described by the authors in a related paper 10 , resulted in the development of a unique, multi-level representation (Figure 1) that is accessible to high school students, applicable in engineering teacher preparation courses, and authentic to the experience of professional engineers.