Hi Alan,

Thank you! Yes, all the students were enrolled in courses (mostly required) and the project was integrated into their assignments. 

Thanks for your great question, Shellie!

We had two models for our collaborations. In the first model, elementary students (4th or 5th graders) came to our university (ODU) for an Engineering Day field trip. Our small teams of education and engineering students taught one hour lessons to approximately 10-12 elementary students. In the second model, our education and engineering students went out to the schools for an after school technology club for 5th graders. My education students ran the club for its entirety (10 weeks) leading a variety of tech activities. The engineering students joined us for three clubs sessions that focused on robotics. 

In both cases, the education and engineering students engaged in activities together before their lessons with the elementary students in order to prepare for their experiences.

Both collaboration models have been pretty successful and the elementary students have responded well (or at least they've been signing up for more!)

Thanks for your question, Patricia!

We had two models for our collaborations. In the first model, elementary students (4th or 5th graders) came to our university (ODU) for an Engineering Day field trip. Our small teams of education and engineering students taught one hour lessons to approximately 10-12 elementary students. In the second model, our education and engineering students went out to the schools for an after school technology club for 5th graders. My education students ran the club for its entirety (10 weeks) leading a variety of tech activities. The engineering students joined us for three clubs sessions that focused on robotics. All the club sessions were two hours long, but in some cases the engineering students only stayed for about 75 minutes.

In both cases, the education and engineering students engaged in activities together before their lessons with the elementary students in order to prepare for their experiences.

Hi Jennifer, 

I am a STEM teacher in Massachusetts, so I address the Science and Engineering/Technology state standards during my specialist class. I'm interested to learn more about how Virginia is planning to have teachers address the Engineering and computer science standards in their core classes. Do you think that the model of STEM as a specialist subject will continue? From your project, it seems that you are preparing teachers to address these SOLs in all settings. 

Hi Michelle,

Your question is one I also have. I frequently ask administrators how they are planning to address these new standards. I rarely hear a concrete plan. I'm going to ask my colleague Kristie to chime in here too. But, from what I can see, and with efforts like Code VA, which is training teachers to bring CS into the core classes, I think the responsibility is going to fall to regular classroom teachers. This worries me because I know most preK-6 teachers feel very uncomfortable with this expectation and as a result, I see teachers sending kids off to a website, in the best case scenario, and completely neglecting these subjects as the worst case.  I am hoping our project can help prevent that by helping preservice teachers feel confident and capable in both engineering and CS, but we definitely have our work cut out for us.

One part of our project that hasn't started yet is a PD summer session for our grads once they've completed a year of teaching. We're going to pay them (and a teacher buddy of their choice) to come back for a one-day summer workshop to continue their skills in engineering. In addition to the stipend, we'll also give them free supplies and corresponding lesson plans. I'll be interested to see how many takers we get! 

Hi Jennifer, 

Great idea to offer a PD summer session! I would have loved that support after my first year. 

I also worry about the STEM standards falling completely onto classroom teachers. They already have so many other standards groups to address, and with the pressures of state testing, engineering and CS often fall behind. The specialist model is useful in providing a more targeted opportunity to address STEM concepts, but as with all teaching, time is still limited. Troubleshooting and best efforts is all we can do! 

Thanks again for your thoughtful work, 

Michelle 

Good morning Michelle,

Elementary educators are stretched thin and are asked to be the experts in so many different subject areas.  I am not sure what the best answer to this problem is.  I know that in our state, Virginia, the state mandated science standards have recently changed and now include engineering standards like NGSS. While there is a subset of inservice elementary educators who have been integrating engineering into their instruction already, for many, this addition alone will be problematic. That is one reason we decided to implement the "bring a buddy" to PD once our preservice teachers get into their own classrooms. This will at least begin to spread the wealth of understanding with teachers who have not been in the college classroom recently. We are trying to ensure that our graduates are well-equipped to integrate engineering challenges in their future classrooms and to help their students begin to think "like engineers" through the engineering design process.

Relatedly, I am working on another NSF (Computer Science for All) project where we are working with a local school division to design a computer science professional development experience for inservice elementary educators (https://www.inclusivecomputerscience.org/; https://videohall.com/p/1453). The year-long professional development is being  specifically designed to help these educators integrate the new VA Computer Science Standards for Learning into their traditional subject area instruction to meet the needs of all learners in inclusive classrooms.  This is a partnership between Old Dominion University, George Mason University, Code VA, and our local school division. In this way, we are striving to help classroom teachers learn how to integrate computer science into their daily instruction through unplugged and plugged computational thinking lessons. Thus, generally speaking, we are preparing elementary educators to be able to integrate engineering and computer science into their traditional classroom instruction; however, this effort would just be strengthened and enhanced through the support of STEM specialists at school sites where available.

-Kristie

Hello Patrick,

Thanks for your comments and questions. I am one of the engineering professors in the project. I use my Fluid Mechanics class in it and the interdisciplinary collaboration of our students is an integral part of the course. It happens similarly to the other classes in the project.

Let me also tell you why I do believe in this project. I have 3 reasons. 1) My students learn how to work with peers from other fields and learn how to communicate with them. Thus, this goes beyond the mere group work skills, they need to learn how to put technical concepts in simple terms. 2) The fact that they have to explain fluid mechanics concepts to others (education students and elementary school students), helps them to go deeper into their own understanding of those concepts. "Teaching is learning twice." 3) You never know which of your students end up in an academic career, this project helps them to have a flavor of this field. Also, they might end up in outreach activities in their companies.

Thanks for the reply. I can see the value in all the things you mentioned, Orlando. I was wondering if the students themselves saw the value, and I guess they do because you personally communicate it to them!

Very good point. We have surveys, reflections, and focus groups. The results indicate that they do see the value. As with anything in life, you will see a few of them "not drinking the Cool-Aid".

I just finished conducting a focus group interview with Orlando's students today and I think he's got them all drinking the cool-aid. They all told me how they learned from teaching the material - how it made them go back to check and make sure they had all their concepts straight before passing the information on to their education and elementary school partners!

I am really looking forward to hearing what my students said! One point I forgot to mention is that, as it often happens with some students, those who do "not drinking the Cool-Aid" during their undergraduate education typically end up drinking it after getting into the job field. It is just a matter of time for those few.

HI Catherine, Thanks for your question. Yes, we have a qualitative component to our research where we are analyzing all the students' refections as well as focus group interviews. Our postdoc, Dr. Lilian Almeida, has been analyzing a slew of data over the past month and will respond here too. We've been learning that interdisciplinary teamwork  (and just regular teamwork!) is challenging for many groups, although we have a great of scaffolding in place to support the students' collaboration, including custom built google sites. Inevitably, students have different levels of investment. Nevertheless, students are clearly learning from these team-based experiences, including learning how to deal with a team member who does not pull his weight. The great majority of our students report positive experiences. Working with the elementary students is almost always listed as a highlight! 

Hello Catherine. Students have identified many benefits through their participation in this project. Education students in general enjoy learning about engineering, coding, the engineering design process, and science concepts, as well as the opportunity to have a hands-on experience while teaching the children. Engineering students acknowledged the importance of developing communication skills with non-technical audiences, teamwork skills, and service learning. Both education and engineering students indicated learning with each other new beneficial skills. They recounted the enjoyment of working with kids and somehow inspire them to become engineers!

Hi Christopher, I wanted to chime in with something I shared with my team this morning. I was listening to All Things Considered a few days ago and they had an episode on Design Thinking. They shared the story of Doug Dietz of GE Healthcare, and how he transformed MRI machines into kid friendly adventures. Evidently Doug had been feeling pretty proud of his design of a new MRI machine until he witnessed first hand how scared children were to get inside it and learned that many of them had to be sedated. After seeing that, he spent time talking with children, and with their help, redesigned the machine to incorporate adventures that integrated some of the machine's functioning into the story lines: 

"the MRI is a cylindrical spaceship transporting the patient into a space adventure. Just before the whirring and banging of the machine gets louder, the operator encourages young patients to listen closely for the moment that the craft “shifts into hyperdrive.” This reframing transforms a normally terrifying “BOOMBOOM-BOOM” sound into just another part of the adventure."

This strategy of human-centered design, or design thinking, or focusing on developing empathy for the user-- whatever you want to call -- is a really powerful strategy for engineers to develop better solutions --exactly the message your project seems to be aiming for. I'm thinking of sharing this story with our engineer (and education) students next semester. Maybe it will convince a few more of them of the value of diverse perspectives. 

That is a great question. We have three types of collaborations. The one I am involved with is collaboration 3. In this one, we use my "Fluid Mechanics" class (for engineering students) and my colleague's (Dr. Gutierrez) "Developing Instructional Strategies" class (for education students). The enrollment in my class has been about 30 students and in her class, there have been up to 15 students. We typically have about 7 groups and we have been able to handle them well while making sure we support them along with the project. We have not had the need to constrain the number of students and we feel fine about the workload. If you ask me to project how many more teams (of similar size) we can handle, I would say about 10. More than that could be too much.

I will let my other colleagues give their opinion from the other collaborations' perspectives.

Hi Kim, it is great to hear from you...we're glad you enjoyed the video! Thanks for your continued support of the project.  We love hosting students from your school and look forward to being able to get your students back on campus next year! (Fingers crossed!)

Hi Greg!  In our third collaboration, the engineering students in Dr. Ayala's fluid mechanics course were partnered with my students in an elementary science methods course.  In our collaboration we never actually co-taught the classes together.  We organized our classes on campus so that they were offered during the same day/time and they were held in neighboring classrooms.  This allowed for our students to interact more often and break down the barrier of physical proximity to meeting. Dr. Ayala and I met weekly before class to develop course materials and to ensure that the messages we conveyed to our students were consistent.  Additionally, there were times throughout the semester when our student teams were working together and I would supervise and assist some of the interdisciplinary teams of our students, while Dr. Ayala did the same in his classroom.  Our students, Dr. Ayala, and I also visited our local 4th grade student classrooms early in the semester to introduce engineering and fluid mechanics concepts, and to help our students begin to build relationships with the 4th grade students they'd be teaching. On this trip, Dr. Ayala and I split up and both of us supervised half of the student teams at the two elementary school sites. Due to the physical school closures this semester, the 4th grade students were unable to come to ODU on the planned field trip. However, we still helped facilitate student teams to create interactive presentations for virtual distribution to their "assigned" 4th grade classes. Overall, we felt like it was essential for our students to see a united front and to get clear messages for both of our classes through consistent communication.

Hi Greg,

Not sure if my earlier response reached you as I posted as a separate message instead of replying to your message, so I am posting it here again--

Great questions.  There were three collaboration models in the project. I can speak to the second model. Dr. Kidd and I were involved with the second collaboration, where education students from Dr. Kidd's "Educational Technology" Course partner with engineering students from one of my two courses "Bio-inspired Robotics" or "Electromechanical systems" to develop robotics lesson plans geared toward building animal-inspired robots, and teach the developed lessons to 5th graders in an after-school session at a local school. The teams (education students and engineering students) first met in the campus three times (each 75 minutes) over three weeks to collaboratively learn robotics and coding concepts and build robots using robotics kits and use this training to prepare their lesson plans. A collaboration agreement in place between the two partners in each team also explicitly established their roles and responsibilities.

All these gave them ample planning time to engage in a second phase, where they met 5th graders at a local school spanning three times over three consecutive weeks to teach the developed lessons to the elementary kids and also have them build animal-inspired robots as a part of the final design challenge. While the engineering students engaged with education partners at the school for three weeks, the education students continued and met with their 5th grade partners few more times to complete their robot building activities. 

Yes, that's a great suggestion to swap the roles and as you correctly pointed out, it is suited more to the 10 week program (Collaboration 2). Yes, similar to your thoughts, the education students sought support from their engineering partners during three weeks of collaborative teaching at the school, and in later weeks, they were bound to handle many technical and coding activities themselves without help from the engineers. We are also currently exploring a model where my engineering students are asked to step outside their comfort zones and engage in lesson plan development on par with education students. 

Jessica - great question! Speaking as one of the engineers on the project, one of the reasons why we are partnering engineering students with education students is to hopefully help engineering students stay engaged in engineering both through the partnership with education students and the service learning aspect of the project.  I think you can see from our video that in some cases, our education students have increased confidence in being able to teach engineering, but I think that comes with multiple exposures and possibly time to reflect on the project itself.  One challenge I have as an engineering professor is how to make sure my students value the education students' contribution. It has made me think that we need to be sure that if engineers are strengthening the k-12 teaching force, we need to be sure they value the work of the educators and don't get perceived as someone with knowledge the teacher doesn't have.

Hi Jessica,

Honestly I think Dr Ringleb's students (even being freshmen!) are often really excellent teachers for the elementary students. Not all of them, there are exceptions, like some who have a difficult time adjusting their vocabulary, but by and large I have been really impressed with their ability to engage with the kids. As a teacher educator I am obviously committed to helping my students gain these skills, but my students often start out STEM adverse whereas the engineering students are the opposite. Would we call that STEM excited? And, they are often surprised by how much they enjoy interacting with kids and sharing their passion. So, your question was, what was easier? I would say teaching engineers to communicate with kids? What is more necessary? Teaching teachers about engineering! Thanks for the excellent question.

Wow Bryce, what a wonderful comment! You were the first to address all our questions! And, I'm thrilled you are going to share our project with your colleagues. It sounds like you have the perfect group for a similar project. 

As for affective outcomes, we have been collecting written reflections and conducting focus groups. Through these we are learning what both groups find beneficial (working with the kids!) and challenging (working with each other!). We have also been exploring different ways to measure teamwork skills as well as how satisfied students are with their teams. For the preservice teachers, we look at self-efficacy as well as attitudes about engineering and intention to teach engineering lessons in their future classrooms. We are working on instrument validation. It's been an interesting journey to find the right measures. 

You are right about having the populations deliberately teach one another. My smarter colleagues, Orlando and Kristie, implemented that in their collaboration and I think it is valuable activity. That second half of really forcing them to reverse roles during the lessons with kids, that's trickier. One idea I've seen be pretty successful is to have the 4-5 college students each assign themselves to one smaller group of elementary students during their lessons so everyone is a teacher and everyone is responsible for fielding the engineering questions of their assigned students. We'll keep working on this. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thank you also for appreciating the differing status of the two professions. I'm trying to elevate my status by hanging out with engineering faculty! They keep telling me to ask for a raise! The engineering (and education!) students are both starting to appreciate the work that goes into developing an effective lesson. This semester was especially interesting as we had both populations working on virtual asynchronous (google slides) and synchronous (Zoom) lessons with 5th graders. The asynchronous lessons required all the work of lesson planning without the reward of student interaction! The Zoom lessons were their own challenge because they were building robots! (Can you hold that piece up to the camera again?!) In both models, the work required for a good lesson was readily apparent. So, maybe were making headway there.

Now, on to your project. My 11 year old son spends hour and hours on Minecraft and ADORES dragons. How do I "sneak the vegetables into his Mac and Cheese"? Are your quests available for others to use, or only within your summer camp? Please say you share. :-)

Thanks again for posting!

Jennifer

That's probably the "good student" in me, I see this set of questions and am automatically compelled to try to answer them.

I don't think the quests from our project are available publicly yet but our intention is that they will be very soon (I think on our end it's more a logistics issue right now in terms of how best to disseminate). So keep an eye out for that. You might keep in touch with our project lead PI, Dr. Nick Lux, about when and how that will occur.

I think the jury is still out if we've effectively served students their vegetables, but we did see some improvements in spatial reasoning skills in our second year when we moved to the story-based version of the camp. The change in their scores on the spatial reasoning instruments was not statistically significant (though we did only have 40 participants), but the time they completed the instruments did significantly decrease. Most striking though was how engaged they were with the story-based camp as opposed to the summer before when they were simply solving spatial reasoning tasks within Minecraft. We're hoping to explore this in more depth in future work.

Thanks for the reply, and for checking out our project!