Ready, Set, Design!
Wind-up cars and electric puppets are hallmarks of a 20-year-old program that gets elementary students and teachers from Alaska to the South Bronx excited about STEM.
By Rosemarie Wesson with Gary Benenson
Children are natural engineers and experimenters. Yet few elementary schools provide the unique learn-by-doing environment that comes with engineering. It fosters adaptability, persistence, problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. The City Technology Project bridges the gap through engaging design projects that motivate students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
The hands-on program grew out of an NSF-funded professional development effort called City Science, which used the urban environment as a source of material for elementary science. Some 75 public elementary school teachers from Harlem and the South Bronx were involved from 1992 to 1995. Since then, the 20-year-old offshoot has expanded to include school districts in 20 states, from Alaska to New York, and focused more broadly on design activities as contexts for standards-based math, science, English, and social studies.
Consider Fantastic Elastic, a second- and third-grade unit that involves designing and making wind-up vehicles from such common materials as paper cups, plastic lids, rubber bands, beads, wooden skewers, and paper clips. Students troubleshoot these devices and explore their properties. Why won’t the vehicle move? Once I get it to go, how can I make it go faster, further, in a straight line or circle? As in an engineering lab, there are no right or wrong answers. Students learn to share their findings with one another and write troubleshooting guides and manuals about how their devices work. Beyond building and testing their designs, children identify issues and their causes, fix them, find variables, and explore their relationships.
In another unit, ElectroCity, students learn to create circuits with batteries, LEDs, buzzers, and motors. They fashion their own switches and battery holders using paper fasteners and tape, then use these materials to create scenes and gadgets. A popular activity is to make electric puppets whose eyes light up when the mouth is closed. As with the wind-ups, there are no prescribed answers, so children are free to exercise their ingenuity. Discussion, troubleshooting, and writing are key components of this unit.
City Technology materials have now made their way into pre-service and in-service teacher education programs at a large number of institutions, including the University of the District of Columbia, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the University of Wisconsin, Stout, Jackson State University, the University of Southern California, Hunter College (City University of New York), and two tribal colleges: Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Minnesota and Aaniiih Nakoda (Ft. Belknap) College in Montana. The program has been featured in doctoral seminars on engineering education at the universities of Illinois, Georgia, Minnesota, and Utah State, as well as in invited talks at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The project involves an equally diverse group of public elementary school teachers and students. In addition to Harlem and the South Bronx, they hail from the central Brooklyn, N.Y. communities of Brownsville, Bushwick, and Bedford Stuyvesant; from Watts and Eagle Rock (in Los Angeles); and a rural district in northern Minnesota that serves Native American children from the Fond du Lac and Bois Forte (Ojibwe) reservations.
What’s impressive about the City Technology Project is how it attempts to address the pressing national need for innovation in K-12 education. The project introduces novel strategies, which, with the appropriate levels of instruction, can easily be adopted nationwide. These strategies include: engaging teachers and children as part of the design team; integration across subject areas, including art, English, and social studies as well as STEM; use of inexpensive or recycled materials; and the design of curriculum, professional development, materials, and assessments as a unified whole.
Research activities also are underway. A current collaboration with researchers at the City College of New York, the University of San Francisco, and Montana State University is proposing to investigate cognitive and affective outcomes of science/engineering integration based on City Technology materials. Faculty members at Vanderbilt and Appalachian State universities also have led research and evaluation efforts.
Examples of student work, complete curricula, and videos can be found at the City Technology website, http://www.citytechnology.org/. Kids discovering engineering – what a promising future!
Rosemarie Wesson is associate dean for research at the Grove School of Engineering, City College of New York, where Gary Benenson is a professor of mechanical engineering and project director of City Technology.