Hey there fellow Virginian! It's exciting to see how you were able to adapt to the virtual environment. Dying the water blue was a clever strategy. Congratulations on your work.

This is a great fun project!

As a physicist and a former R&D engineer, I am excited to see this work taking place and the free curriculum being available.

You commented a bit on teacher support in your video. Are you seeing any differences in the support levels needed for elementary school vs. middle or high school teachers? With elementary school teachers being generalists rather than specialists (i.e., they have to teach all subjects rather than specialize in just one), I wonder if you see differences in the type of support needed. I would also like to hear more about how you measure students learning of physics and engineering design principles.

Thank you for this fun video and this exciting work!

Thank you for visiting, watching and reaching out. We offer teacher training via workshops and also send a student team to help in the classroom if needed. The simplicity of the experiments makes it easy for the teachers at all levels. The experiments are the same for all levels-however data collection and analyses is different at different levels. For example, if you are teaching material strength and about gels, you can bring in concepts from Physics and chemistry at a higher level.

For engineering students, we had a robust assessment strategy (pre- and post) -online surveys, focus groups, concept mapping etc. For school students we conducted pre and post surveys on learning about engineering and aspirations to be an engineer. For educators, we asked about ease of integration, challenges etc.

Some of our publications have more information:

K. Jahan, C. Bodnar, S. Farrell, Y. Tang, I. Noshadi, CS Slater  DS Miller (2019) Improving Students’ Learning Behaviors through Hands-on Algae Based Project, ,Intl.Journal Engg Education, Vol 35, No. 5,Pages 1343-1352.

K. Jahan, Roisin Breen, Patricia Hurley, Erin Pepe, Jaiyun Shen (2018) An Algae-Based Curriculum for Globally Conscious Engineering Education, International Journal  for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, ISSN 2042-6364 (Online)​.

I will definitely take a look! We are particularly interested in doing more concept mapping in our future work. Thanks for the resource.

Really interesting project.  I love the gaming aspect for grades 4-7.

Hello. I'm a high school physics teacher and am currently involved in a project where I'm assisting a Navy STEM Outreach office in developing some new Navy-relevant hands-on science activities. I will definitely look more into your website to understand the suite of materials that you have produced!

Your recognition that FLEET has been widely used in STEM special events, but not so much in HS/MS classrooms matches my experiences.  Course curriculum is already so packed with requirements that it is hard to pick up anything new.  Aligning with standards should help.  Have you considered any other strategies for reaching classroom teachers and integrating into core classes?

I'm excited to hear about the wide range of audiences your FLEET project serves.  It's great to see a program that grows with the students from elementary all the way through high school and university.  It will be exciting to see longitudinal impacts as your project continues and to see if there are students who were truly "hooked" in 4th grade and then followed all the way through to a naval engineering career.  What data will you be collecting to see these impacts?

This looks like an interesting and fun project and it is impressive how you became Twitch gamers during the pandemic!  :)  I shared it with our physics teachers and hope you get some more high school class participation.  It seems like a fabulous and fun application of their learning.

 Dear Michael,

Do you have any outreach to students with videos and or virtual presentations? FLEET look awesome and I will be happy to share it with our partners 

Very cool project! Can you tell me more about how you use Twitch with students and, maybe, any recommendations you have for someone who's not as familiar with Twitch (have only listened in once) but would like to learn more about how this forum can benefit students and their teachers. Thank you!