With national efforts to include engineering in K-12 education, we have seen engineering design proliferate in formal and informal educational settings over the past 20 years.  Many engineering education initiatives work to engage K-12 students in hands-on design projects, guided by a simplified representation of professional engineering design process models.  However, to date, minimal attention has been paid to how the engineering design process is simplified and transposed for children in learning environments.  In this talk, I will explore preliminary evidence from children’s drawing and planning in engineering design tasks that suggests students’ engineering design practices are mediated by multiple factors.  I argue that we should consider the dynamics of development and learning more carefully in our transposition of engineering design for young learners.  

Bio

Dr. Merredith Portsmore is the Director for Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (ceeo.tufts.edu) as well as a Research Assistant Professor at the Center.  Merredith received all four of her degrees from Tufts (B.A. English, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, M.A. Education, PhD in Engineering Education) and has been a member of the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach for 18 years, previously serving as the Director of Outreach and a program manager.   Her research interests focus on how to explain and support children’s development of engineering design practices.  Her outreach work focuses on creating resources for K-12 educators to support engineering education in the classroom.  She is the founder of STOMP (stompnetwork.org), LEGOengineering.com (legoengineering.com), and the new Online K-12 Engineering Education program (okee.tufts.edu).  Merredith is currently serving as a 100Kin10 (100kin10.org) Engineering Fellow and a member of the ASEE Pre-College Engineering Education Division board.