by Seattle Public Schools, the Teaching Channel, Boeing, and the University of Washington

The Institute for Science + Math Education has partnered with teachers from the Seattle and Houston areas, Boeing, and the Teaching Channel to create a series of lessons and videos centered around engineering practices. This fall, these resources are being released on the Teaching Channel website, along with videos of the teachers modeling and explaining key lessons.

The partnership brought together multiple areas of expertise to create two-week engineering units; each unit is aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), in a new vision that incorporates real-world practices and cross-cutting concepts into lessons. The Institute for Science + Math Education led training for the teachers and engineers as they designed their lessons, offering templates to align lessons with the NGSS and up-to-date educational research. Engineers from Boeing offered guidance on real-world engineering practices, content and thought-processes as they worked with teachers to design the units.  

These lessons introduce design challenges to students based on real-world, current topics in engineering. Design challenges range from testing wind turbine blade designs to creating and testing biopolymers. This partnership is helping bring engineering thinking and lessons to learners earlier in their schooling; these lessons were developed for students from grades 4-8.

One of the most recent videos features Marcia Ventura, a Seattle-area teacher, who worked with Boeing engineers and Institute for Science + Math Education to design a 2-week lesson on CubeSats satellite models, asking Ventura’s fifth-grade class to design and test model satellites.

The recent story Fifth Grade Rocket Scientists explores this curriculum unit and the Institute’s involvement in it. Last school year, Ventura worked with Graduate Researcher Veronica McGowan to design several science and engineering lessons, including the CubeSat unit. McGowan is now studying those lessons and their implementation as part of her dissertation.

Watch the video:
Explore the Teaching Channel’s curricula and videos created by this partnership at https://www.teachingchannel.org/engineering-curriculum-boeing