Curriculum Materials
Most humans spend over 95% of their time interacting with technology. Pencils, chairs, water filters, toothbrushes, cell phones, and buildings are all technologies -- solutions designed by engineers to fulfill human needs or wants. To understand the world we live in, it is vital that we foster engineering and technological literacy among all people, even young children! Fortunately, children are born engineers - they are fascinated with building, with taking things apart, and with how things work. The Engineering is Elementary (EiE) project harnesses children's natural curiosity to promote learning of engineering and technology concepts.
Engineering is Elementary (EiE) is a research-based curricular program that integrates engineering and technology concepts with elementary science topics. EiE materials also connect with literacy, social studies, and mathematics. EiE is developing materials for 20 elementary science school topics and engineering fields. Each unit is designed to engage children in the engineering design process and includes:
- Introductory Materials include an introduction to the Engineering is Elementary program. It also includes:
- Unit Summary Charts that provide a summary of the lesson and student learning, science tie-in content and lessons from widely used, inquiry-based science curricula (GEMS, FOSS, STC, Insights), and alignment with Massachusetts and national technology and engineering standards
- Unit Assessment section that provides more information on how to use the assessment tools provided to evaluate student learning
- Unit Materials List that lists all of the materials necessary for the unit to help you assemble the appropriate supplies, while the
- Unit Vocabulary List and Vocabulary Definitions that provide a comprehensive list of the vocabulary that your students will be introduced to in this unit.
- A storybook narrated by a child character from around the world. As the child tries to solve a problem, s/he is introduced to engineering, some basic engineering concepts, related science content, and cultural knowledge about the country. The storybook sets the context for the engineering challenge that readers will engage with.
- Lesson Plans for teachers. These materials include vocabulary, objectives, tie-in science content, a lesson overview, background, student learning, detailed materials and preparation sections, instructions for the activity, and duplication masters for student worksheets.
- Duplication Masters for students. To accommodate differences in students' cognitive and linguistic abilities, the units contain two levels of duplication masters: beginning (for earlier readers, less cognitively complex) and advanced (for more advanced readers, more cognitively complex). The duplication masters are identified as beginning or advanced with an "A" or "B" box in the upper right corner of the worksheet, and worksheets to be used by all grade levels are labeled with both "A" and "B." Teachers can choose the sheets that best meet the abilities of their students.
- Student Assessments. These include rubrics, multiple choice, and open-ended questions that educators can use to gauge their students' understanding and learning of engineering, technology, and science concepts.
- Background information and additional reference resources for educators.
All student curricular materials are available in English and Spanish and are designed to meet both the Massachusetts K-12 Technology/Engineering Framework, and the ITEA Standards for Technological Literacy.
At its core, EiE is designed to have students engineer. The program develops interesting problems and contexts and invites children to have fun as they use their knowledge of science and engineering to design, create, and improve solutions.
