But what exactly are children learning about engineering? And what kind of teaching truly captures their attention?

“We have effective practices, but not yet best practices,” says Tamara Moore, associate professor of engineering education.

Moore and Morgan Hynes, assistant professor of engineering education, are among six faculty members of Purdue’s Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering (INSPIRE), which carries out research to improve engineering education from preschool through the 12th grade. They partner with teachers to create and optimize curricula, reaching out to diverse populations of students by tapping into their personal interests and real-world issues.

“The work we’re doing here at Purdue is groundbreaking,” Moore adds. “There just are not that many people out there doing what we’re doing.”

Students participated in workshops through the Purdue Athletes Life Success Program (PALS) and the summer camp for children called Pre-Freshman and Cooperative Education (PREFACE). (Photo provided)

Picturing engineering design

After earning a Purdue degree in math with a minor in math education, Moore taught math in high school for seven years, and then returned to the University for graduate study in math education. Working on a grant to write problems for first-year engineering students, she says, she fell in love with the way the problems could engage students with math.

Moore went on to gain a PhD in engineering education and then taught at the University of Minnesota, where one key effort was the EngrTEAMS project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which helps about 200 Minnesota teachers create curricular units for their students in grades 4-8. Returning to Purdue in 2013, she has continued to act as lead principal investigator for EngrTEAMS.

Her other major initiative is PictureSTEM, which brings engineering, math and science learning into elementary classrooms by combining appealing and appropriate picture books with lessons and engineering design activities. Moore has co-developed the K-5 PictureSTEM curricula with Kristina Tank, a former graduate advisee and now an assistant professor at Iowa State University.

PictureSTEM gives kids a chance to use their creativity and hone their higher-order problem solving. The literacy component is tightly embedded along with engineering, math and science concepts and practice, she says. A first-grade module, for example, introduces hamsters and habitats plus concepts of testing materials, and the children design a habitat trail for their imaginary hamster with three-dimensional geometric shapes.

“You can make it personally meaningful for the kids by the way you introduce the problems to them,” Moore emphasizes.

Though some classroom kits for science and engineering are highly expensive to buy and keep furnished, “we tried to pick out things that were very inexpensive, not hard to replenish, or already existing in the classrooms,” she says. “Of course if you have a technology available, you can add it in as well.”

Moore, Tank and their colleagues focus most of their efforts on K-2 classrooms, which have few other engineering curricula available. The modules are continually revised, honed and made available on the PictureSTEM.org website, and the designing hamster habitats unit already is in use by several school districts.

Looking ahead, Moore hopes to add “computational thinking” components to the PictureSTEM modules. Here the idea is not to teach computer programming but some simple underlying concepts in logic and repeatable thinking, “which would allow a different way of problem solving for the kids,” she says.

Students use creativity to learn engineering concepts. (Photo provided)  

Taking a personal interest

Hynes gained a mechanical engineering degree at Tufts University, worked in industry and then returned to the school for a PhD in engineering education. Working on projects in the Boston public schools, he discovered that he greatly enjoyed interacting with middle school teachers and students.

Teachers who initially worried that they couldn’t teach engineering concepts found that, once they had some training, engineering activities became great classroom learning opportunities, he says. Moreover, the activities often appealed to students who didn’t do well otherwise in school.

After working as research faculty at Tufts for three years, Hynes arrived at Purdue in 2013. His research has two closely related themes: to widen the net for all students to experience and interact with engineering, and to understand how students engage in engineering design processes and activities.

Regardless of what might be assumed based on a student’s gender or race or location, “their interests will be all over the place, and we need to make sure that we appeal to as many of them as possible,” he says.

His research creates learning approaches and tools, and he collaborates closely with teachers to bring these improvements into the classroom. “I prefer not to tell teachers what to do; I work with them to find solutions that work best for them,” he says.

”A lot of my work is looking at how we can connect across disciplines — arts and humanities and science and math — so the engineering activity is situated in the real world and not just a lab for the duration of the activity,” Hynes says.

For instance, children enjoy the common exercise of building bridges out of gumdrops and popsicle sticks, but the benefits of that exercise may not persist. “Many classroom activities are situationally interesting, but don’t have the long-term impact of activities that appeal to what students want to do personally,” he notes.

Many common ways to bring engineering into a classroom, like building robots to compete against each other, may not appeal strongly to everyone. Kids may be more engaged, for example, in designing devices that could help in addressing a disability or other real human needs.

“We want to find activities that more broadly capture an engineering problem, so students will find some personal interest that also gives them a more real-life experience of engineering,” he says.

Delivering these flexible learning opportunities is more difficult than following a narrowly defined worksheet or buying a kit, he acknowledges. Assembling the materials for an exercise, for example, may require considerable creative thinking.

“It’s tricky, but that’s what I work toward,” Hynes says. And he and his co-workers are seeing clear payoffs in the classroom. “It’s very exciting to see kids having natural discussions and making real engineering designs without us prompting them.”